of the brickwork, and decay
only too plainly visible in the crazy angles of the tiled roof. But the
ivy which covered portions of the brickwork hid some of the ravages of
age, and helped the moat-house to show a brave front to the world, a
well-preserved survivor of an ornamental period in a commonplace and
ugly generation.

The place looked as though it belonged to the past and the ghosts of the
past. To cross the moat bridge was to step backward from the twentieth
century into the seventeenth. The moss-grown moat walls enclosed an
old-world garden, most jealously guarded by high yew hedges trimmed into
fantastic shapes of birds and animals; a garden of parterres and lawns,
where tritons blew stone horns, and naked nymphs bathed in marble
fountains; with an ancient sundial on which the gay scapegrace Suckling
had once scribbled a sonnet to a pair of blue eyes--a garden full of
sequestered walks and hidden nooks where courtly cavaliers and
bewitching dames in brocades and silks, patches and powder, had played
at the great game of love in their day. That day was long since dead.
The tritons and nymphs remained, to remind humanity that stone and
marble are more durable than flesh and blood, but the lords and ladies
had gone, never to return, unless, indeed, their spirits walked the
garden in the white stillness of moonlit nights. They may well have done
so. It was easy to imagine such light-hearted beauties visiting again
the old garden to revive dead memories of love and laughter: shadowy
forms stealing forth to assignations on the blanched, dew-laden lawn,
their roguish faces and bright eyes--if ghosts have eyes--peeping out of
ghostly hoods at gay ghostly cavaliers; coquetting and languishing
behind ghostly fans; perhaps even feeding, with ghostly little hands,
the peacocks which still kept the terrace walk above the moat.

The spectacle of a group of modern ladies laughing and chatting at tea
in the cloistered recesses of the terrace garden struck a note as
sharply incongruous as a flock of parrots chattering in a cathedral.

It was the autumn of 1918, and with one exception the ladies seated at
the tea-tables on the lawn represented the new and independent type of
womanhood called into existence by the national exigencies of war. The
elder of them looked useful rather than beautiful, as befitted patriotic
Englishwomen in war-time; the younger ones were pretty and charming, but
they were all workers, or pretended w