"Well, let it alone, then; I don't care,' was the somewhat sullen reply, and the brother and sister separated for the night. The last sound in the house was the gentle closing of Mrs. Brandon's room-door, at which she had been standing shivering with cold and weariness, while she watched her son's noiseless ascent of the stairs at two o'clock in the morning. 75 CHAPTER III. "O'er a garden bowered close, With plaited alleys of the trailing rose ; Of crowned lilies standing near Purple spiked lavender." TENNYSON. EARLE'S COURT was a somewhat gloomy, old-fashioned red-brick house, built in the picturesque style of Queen Elizabeth's reign. A lawn in front, with two avenues of stately old trees sloped down to the river, on which the town of Kingsmills was built; and behind, enclosed with high brick walls, lay a stiff quaint garden, with terraced walks, and rows upon rows of espalier apple-trees, and here and there a broken-nosed statue, or a sun-dial held up by the hands of fantastic figures long ago moss-grown and weather-beaten out of all recognition of their allegorical characters. Whole tribes of birds, driven away from all their other haunts in the neighbourhood by the noise of the manufactory wheels, or by the rising up everywhere of fresh rows of houses, took refuge in the thick trees in front, or in the crevices and corners of the old garden walls, and paid for their safe lodging by making such a clamour of music all through the spring days, that only Major Earle's over-sensitive ear could detect, through it, the not very distant noise of the town, or the murmur of voices and clang of machinery from the obnoxious square of ground, only three fields off, where Mr. Meyer's manufactory chimnies protruded their black faces through the trees. It was a place well fitted to test, by the impressions it produced, the character and temper of its inmates. By the help of the birds, and the high walls, and the overshadowing trees, it was not difficult to wander from morning till night in the garden, or to sit out musing on the lawn, and wrapt in fancies of the past, and fed by country sounds and garden-perfumes, to gather no hint of the busy, modern, struggling life, the signs of which were advancing every day nearer and nearer, setting the quaint, fair picture in a huge black frame of smoke and brick-work. On the other hand, it was just as easy to see nothing in the garden but leaves crumpled up by smoke, or flowers profaned by manufactory-dust, and to lose the soothing impression from the still shade of the trees, by perpetually catching glimpses, through their foliage, of the coal-barges as they passed up and down the river. Equally characteristic were the thoughts which the old house suggested to the passersby. Some contented themselves with wondering how any proprietor could be so indifferent to modern improvement as to let the old-fashioned stiff gardens, and weather-stained house remain untouched, to be shamed by its gay neighbours; others lamented that there was no prospect of such a large space of ground being turned to more profitable account. Some few, wandering by the river side on summer evenings after their day's labour in the hot town, would linger long to look over the water at the two avenues of trees and the smooth fresh lawn and the quaint stone copings of the red house, and feel, they hardly knew why, that there were few things they would less willingly have spared from their lives than this one scene, that, in the busy present, looked at them with the quiet face of the past. Still and changeless as the old house looked, however, there had been no lack of troubles and changes within. The peace that rested in garden shade and projecting gallery was only surface deep; it had never found its way into the house, or penetrated as far as the |