in Brazil and the Antilles and
Mexico and the far West--it was in the face of Lady Cressage that he
seemed to discern the most genuine interest.

Why should she frighten him, then, by daylight? The whimsical theory
that the wine at dinner had given him a spurious courage occurred
to him. He shrugged his shoulders at it, and, with his hands in his
pockets, turned toward the stables.

The stable-yard is, from some points of view, the prettiest thing about
Hadlow. There is a big, uneven, grass-grown space, in the centre of
which, from a slight mound, springs an aged oak of tremendous girth
and height. All around this enclosure are buildings of the same pale
yellowish brick as the mansion itself, but quaintly differing one
from another in design and size. Stables, carriage-houses, kennels, a
laundry, a brewery, and half a dozen structures the intention of which
is now somewhat uncertain--some flat-topped, some gabled, others with
turrets, or massive grouped chimneys, or overhanging timbered upper
stories--form round this unkempt, shadowed green a sort of village, with
a communal individuality of its own.

A glance shows its feudal relation to, and dependence upon, the great
house behind which it nestles; some of the back-kitchens and offices
of this great house, indeed, straggle out till they meet and merge
themselves into this quadrangle. None the less, it presents to the
enquiring gaze a specific character, of as old a growth, one might
think, as the oak itself. Here servants have lived, it may be, since
man first learned the trick of setting his foot on his brother's neck.
Plainly enough, the monks' servants lived and worked here; half the
buildings on the side nearest the house belong to their time, and one
of them still bears a partially-defaced coat of arms that must have
belonged to an Abbot. And when lay lord succeeded cleric, only the garb
and vocabulary of servitude were altered in this square. Its population
crossed themselves less, and worked much harder, but they remained in a
world of their own, adjacent aud subject to the world of their masters,
yet separated from it by oh! such countless and unthinkable distances.

Thorpe sauntered along the side of the stables. He counted three men
and a boy who visibly belonged to this department. The dog-cart of the
previous evening had been run out upon the brick-pavement which drained
the stables, and glistened with expensive smartness now beneath the
sponge of one