s, supported by colonnades, with the central block. These wings
plainly contained the stables and offices of the house. Each was
surmounted by an ornamental cupola with a gilded vane.

An evening light shone on the building, making the window-panes glow like
so many fires. Away from the Hall in front stretched a flat park studded
with oaks and fringed with firs, which stood out against the sky. The
clock in the church-tower, buried in trees on the edge of the park, only
its golden weather-cock catching the light, was striking six, and the
sound came gently beating down the wind. It was altogether a pleasant
impression, though tinged with the sort of melancholy appropriate to an
evening in early autumn, that was conveyed to the mind of the boy who was
standing in the porch waiting for the door to open to him.

The post-chaise had brought him from Warwickshire, where, some six months
before, he had been left an orphan. Now, owing to the generous offer of
his elderly cousin, Mr Abney, he had come to live at Aswarby. The offer
was unexpected, because all who knew anything of Mr Abney looked upon him
as a somewhat austere recluse, into whose steady-going household the
advent of a small boy would import a new and, it seemed, incongruous
element. The truth is that very little was known of Mr Abney's pursuits
or temper. The Professor of Greek at Cambridge had been heard to say that
no one knew more of the religious beliefs of the later pagans than did
the owner of Aswarby. Certainly his library contained all the then
available books bearing on the Mysteries, the Orphic poems, the worship
of Mithras, and the Neo-Platonists. In the marble-paved hall stood a fine
group of Mithras slaying a bull, which had been imported from the Levant
at great expense by the owner. He had contributed a description of it to
the _Gentleman's Magazine_, and he had written a remarkable series of
articles in the _Critical Museum_ on the superstitions of the Romans of
the Lower Empire. He was looked upon, in fine, as a man wrapped up in his
books, and it was a matter of great surprise among his neighbours that he
should ever have heard of his orphan cousin, Stephen Elliott, much more
that he should have volunteered to make him an inmate of Aswarby Hall.

Whatever may have been expected by his neighbours, it is certain that Mr
Abney--the tall, the thin, the austere--seemed inclined to give his young
cousin a kindly reception. The moment the front-door wa