"Aren't you ever coming?" the voice of Esther called across the field, and Mark hurried away to rejoin her on the grassgrown drive that led round the cedar grove to Rushbrooke Grange.
"It's too late now to go inside," he objected.
They were standing before the house.
"It's not too late at all," she contradicted eagerly. "Down here it seems later than it really is."
Rushbrooke Grange lacked the architectural perfection of the average Cotswold manor. Being a one-storied building it occupied a large superficial area, and its tumbling irregular roofs of freestone, the outlines of which were blurred by the encroaching mist of vegetation that overhung them, gave the effect of water, as if the atmosphere of this dank valley had wrought upon the substance of the building and as if the architects themselves had been confused by the rivalry of the trees by which it was surrounded. The owners of Rushbrooke Grange had never occupied a prominent position in the county, and their estates had grown smaller with each succeeding generation. There was no conspicuous author of their decay, no outstanding gamester or libertine from whose ownership the family's ruin could be dated. There was indeed nothing of interest in their annals except an attack upon the Grange by a party of armed burglars in the disorderly times at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the squire's wife and two little girls were murdered while the squire and his sons were drinking deep in the Stag Inn at Wychford four miles away. Mark did not feel much inclined to blunt his impression of the chapel by perambulating Rushbrooke Grange under the guidance of Mrs. Honeybone, the old housekeeper; but Esther perversely insisted upon seeing the garden at any rate, giving as her excuse that the Rector would like them to pay the visit. By now it was a pink and green May dusk; the air was plumy with moths' wings, heavy with the scent of apple blossom.
"Well, you must explain who we are," said Mark while the echoes of the bell died away on the silence within the house and they waited for the footsteps that should answer their summons. The answer came from a window above the porch where Mrs. Honeybone's face, wreathed in wistaria, looked down and demanded in accents that were harsh with alarm who was there.
"I am the Rector's sister, Mrs. Honeybone," Esther explained.
"I don't care who you are," said Mrs. Honeybone. "You have no business to go ringing the bell at this time of the evening. It frightened me to death."
"The Rector asked me to call on you," she pressed.
Mark had already been surprised by Esther's using her brother as an excuse to visit the house and he was still more surprised by hearing her speak so politely, so ingratiatingly, it seemed, to this grim woman embowered in wistaria.