He passed before the front of the Abbey--a mansion of the dead, with
row after row of closed blinds, masses of smokeless chimneys, and
patches of weeds growing thick in the great sweep before the house.
Even with its air of pitiless desertion, its severe,
semi-ecclesiastical outline, its ruined cloisters empty to the sky on
one wing, its unbroken and gloomy silence, the place had its
atmosphere.  David slackened the speed of his car, paused for a moment
and looked back at the little creeper-covered cottage on the other side
of the moat.  So those two had faced one another through the years--the
Abbey, silent, magnificent, historical, with all the placid majesty of
its countless rows of windows; its chapel, where Mandeleys for
generations had been christened and buried,--at its gates the little
cottage, whose garden was filled with spring flowers, and from whose
single stack of chimneys the smoke curled upwards.  Even while he
watched, Richard Vont stood there upon the threshold with a great book
under his arm.

David shivered a little as he threw in the clutch, passed on round the
back of the building and through the iron gates of the ancient dower
house.  He felt a little sigh of relief as he pulled up in front of the
long, grey house, in front of which Sylvia Laycey was waiting to
receive him.  She waved her hand gaily and looked with admiration at
the car.

"They are all here, Mr. Thain," she exclaimed,--"Mr. Merridrew and
father and your own builder.  Come along and quarrel about the
fixtures.  I thought I had better stay with you because dad loses his
temper so."

David descended almost blithely from his car.  He was back again in a
human atmosphere, and the pressure of the girl's fingers was an instant
relief to him.

"I am not going to quarrel with any one," he declared.  "I shall do
exactly what Mr. Muddicombe tells me--and you."

She was a very pleasant type of young Englishwoman--distinctly pretty,
fair-skinned, healthy and good-humoured.  Notwithstanding the fact that
their acquaintance was of the briefest, David was already conscious of
her charm.

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