ether, and call it
merely the Court.

It stood proudly upon what was rather a notable elevation for those flat
parts--a massive mansion of simple form, built of a grey stone which
seemed at a distance almost white against the deep background of yews
and Italian pines behind it. For many miles seaward this pale front
was a landmark. From the terrace-walk at its base, one beheld a great
expanse of soft green country, sloping gently away for a long distance,
then stretching out upon a level which on misty days was interminable.
In bright weather, the remote, low-lying horizon had a defining line of
brownish-blue--and this stood for what was left of a primitive forest,
containing trees much older than the Norman name it bore. It was a
forest which at some time, no doubt, had extended without a break till
it merged into that of Epping--leagues away to the south. The modern
clearance and tillage, however, which separated it now from Epping had
served as a curiously effective barrier--more baffling than the Romans
and Angles in their turn had found the original wildwood. No stranger
seemed ever to find his way into that broad, minutely-cultivated fertile
plain which High Thorpe looked down upon. No railway had pushed its
cheapening course across it. Silent, embowered old country roads and
lanes netted its expanse with hedgerows; red points of tiled roofs,
distinguishable here and there in clusters among the darker greens of
orchards, identified the scattered hamlets--all named in Domesday Book,
all seemingly unchanged since. A grey square church-tower emerging from
the rooks' nests; an ordered mass of foliage sheltering the distant
gables and chimneys of some isolated house; the dim perception on
occasion that a rustic waggon was in motion on some highway, crawling
patiently like an insect--of this placid, inductive nature were all the
added proofs of human occupation that the landscape offered.

Mr. Stormont Thorpe, on an afternoon of early October, yawned in the
face of this landscape--and then idly wondered a little at the mood
which had impelled him to do so. At the outset of his proprietorship he
had bound himself, as by a point of honour, to regard this as the finest
view from any gentleman's house in England. During the first few months
his fidelity had been taxed a good deal, but these temptations and
struggles lay now all happily behind him. He had satisfactorily
assimilated the spirit of the vista, and blended it wi