may look out, Mrs. Bellamy."

CHAPTER XV

It is perhaps time that the reader should know a little of the ancient
house and loyalty where many of the personages of whose history these
pages treat, lived and moved and had their being.

The Abbey House, so called, was in reality that part of the monastery
which had been devoted to the use of successive generations of priors.
It was, like the ruins that lay to its rear, entirely built of grey
masonry, rendered greyer still by the lichens that fed upon its walls,
which were of exceeding strength and thickness. It was a long,
irregular building, and roofed with old and narrow tiles, which from
red had, in the course of ages, faded to sober russet. The banqueting-
hall was a separate building at its northern end, and connected with
the main dwelling by a covered way. The aspect of the house was
westerly, and the front windows looked on to an expanse of park-like
land, heavily timbered with oaks of large size, some of them pollards
that might have pushed their first leaves in the time of William the
Conqueror. In spring their vivid green was diversified by the reddish
brown of a double line of noble walnut-trees, a full half mile in
length, marking the track of the carriage-drive that led to the Roxham
high-road.

Behind the house lay the walled garden, celebrated in the time of the
monks as being a fortnight earlier than any other in the
neighbourhood. Skirting the southern wall of this garden, which was a
little less than a hundred paces long, the visitor reached the
scattered ruins of the old monastery that had for generations served
as a stone quarry to the surrounding villages, but of which enough was
left, including a magnificent gateway, to show how great had been its
former extent. Passing on through these, he would come to an enclosure
that marked the boundaries of the old graveyard, now turned to
agricultural uses, and then to the church itself, a building with a
very fine tower, but possessing no particular interest, if we except
some exceedingly good brasses and a colossal figure of a monk cut out
of the solid heart of an oak, and supposed to be the effigy of a prior
of the abbey who died in the time of Edward I. Below the church again,
and about one hundred and fifty paces from it, was the vicarage, a
comparatively modern building, possessing no architectural attraction,
and evidently reared out of the remains of the monastery