"Not much," he said to himself, spreading out a few sovereigns and some silver on the table, "but it will do."
He put the money in his pocket, took off his gold hunting watch, and then went back to the smoking-room.
"I am going out again, Ralph, as I did last night. If I come in late, you need not take me for a burglar."
Ralph murmured something unintelligible, and Charles ran down-stairs, and let himself out of the drawing-room French window, that long French window to the ground, which Evelyn had taken a fancy to in a neighbor's drawing-room, and which she could never be made to see was not in keeping with the character of her old black-and-white house. He put the shutter back after he had passed through, and carefully drawing the window to behind him, without actually closing it, he took a turn or two upon the bowling-green, and then walked off in the direction of the Slumberleigh woods.
After the lapse of an hour or more he returned as quietly as he had gone, let himself in, made all secure, and stole up to his room.
CHAPTER VII.
Vandon was considered by many people to be the most beautiful house in ----shire.
In these days of great brand-new imitation of intensely old houses, where the amount of ground covered measures the purse of the builder, it is pleasant to come upon a place like Vandon, a quiet old manor-house, neither large nor small, built of ancient bricks, blent to a dim purple and a dim red by that subtle craftsman Time.
Whoever in the years that were no more had chosen the place whereon to build had chosen well. Vandon stood on the slope of a gentle hill, looking across a sweep of green valley to the rising woods beyond, which in days gone by had been a Roman camp, and where the curious might still trace the wide ledges cut among the regular lines of the trees.