Whereupon, like Drake's men, heartened by prayer, they rose from their knees again to take another pull on the rope.
So three times in six weeks those fences were set up and laid flat again; and then it was that Terry Armfield came down, saw the Chapels (as above mentioned), gasped "Shade of Pugin!" and straightway sought Squire Wynne.
But before ever he set eyes on the Squire he had already almost forgotten the errand that had brought him. As the servant showed him to the dining-room he saw that noble ruin of a staircase, and his eyes became illumined. Then, in the dining-room, those same eyes rested on the coffered ceiling and the portraits and the wide mullioned lattice. By the time the Squire entered he was adoring the stately stone fireplace. He swung round, hearing the Squire's step.
"Magnificent, magnificent!" he cried. "Show me over the house—I beg you to show me over the house!—--"
The Squire, who had had this kind of visitor before (though none with quite that perilous smoulder in his eye that Terry had) naturally concluded that a fellow-antiquary, finding himself in the neighbourhood, had permitted himself to beg for a sight of the faded glories of the Plas.
"I'll show you over part of the house with pleasure," said the Squire; and he did so.
"Magnificent!" Terry cried again, when they were once more back in the dining-room. "And oh, that rood-screen—early sixteenth—and those sedilia—in your Church over there! I spent an hour there as I came along."
"Oh, you came Porth Neigr way, did you?" said the Squire.
As if he had previously written the Squire a letter setting forth his business in detail, which therefore he need not repeat, Terry leaped light-heartedly ahead.
"Yes, sir—and then, after that, to come upon those incredible Chapels! (That's a misnomer, by the way, unless they contain relics.) ... Of course, after that I'm not surprised at anything these people do—fences or anything else——"