prints and obscure
portraits in dark frames.

'Ah, yes, come in, Mr Lawford,' he drawled; 'I was beginning to be
afraid you were not coming.'

Lawford laid hat and walking-stick on an oak bench, and followed his
churchyard companion up a slightly inclined corridor and a staircase
into a high room, covered far up the yellowish walls with old books on
shelves and in cases, between which hung in little black frames, mezzo
tints, etchings, and antiquated maps. A large table stood a few paces
from the deep alcove of the window, which was surrounded by a low,
faded, green seat, and was screened from the sunshine by wooden
shutters. And here the tranquil surge of falling water shook incessantly
on the air, for the three lower casements stood open to the fading
sunset. On a smaller table were spread cups, old earthenware dishes of
fruit, and a big bowl of damask roses.

'Please sit down; I shan't be a moment; I am not sure that my sister is
in; but if so, I will tell her we are ready for tea.' Left to himself
in this quiet, strange old room, Lawford forgot for a while everything
else, he was for the moment so taken up with his surroundings.

What seized on his fancy and strangely affected his mind was this
incessant changing roar of falling water. It must be the Widder, he said
to himself, flowing close to the walls. But not until he had had the
boldness to lean head and shoulders out of the nearest window did he
fully realize how close indeed the Widder was. It came sweeping dark
and deep and begreened and full with the early autumnal rains, actually
against the lower walls of the house itself, and in the middle suddenly
swerved in a black, smooth arch, and tumbled headlong into a great
pool, nodding with tall slender water-weeds, and charged in its bubbled
blackness here and there with the last crimson of the setting sun. To
the left of the house, where the waters floated free again, stood vast,
still trees above the clustering rushes; and in glimpses between their
spreading boughs lay the far-stretching countryside, now dimmed with the
first mists of approaching evening. So absorbed he became as he stood
leaning over the wooden sill above the falling water, that eye and ear
became enslaved by the roar and stillness. And in the faint atmosphere
of age that seemed like a veil to hang about the odd old house and these
prodigious branches, he fell into a kind of waking dream.

When at last he did draw back into the room it