"All right," I said. "We will come another day. This may or it may not be the place. Look at your poor legs. They are fat enough; but what a sight for a lady! What a fool you were, not to take my straps!"
"Bless the fellow! Well, you are hard hit, or you would not carry on in this style." Tom turned his eyeglass upon me in a manner which might have provoked me, if I had been capable of thinking twice about him now. "In a blue study, George? Everything looks blue, even the mist in the valley. Has she got blue eyes? Ah! there is nothing like them."
"Blue eyes have no depth. What do you know about eyes?" I spoke with some warmth, as was natural. And then, just to show him how calmly I took his childish and shallow observation, I proceeded as if he had never spoken.
"You see that long mass of black ivy to the right, cutting a sort of jag, or perhaps it is a great curve out of the flat steep line of the meadow?"
"Yes, to be sure I do. Nothing could be plainer. A jag which is a curve at the same time; and a flat meadow which is also steep!"
"Never mind the meadow. You are not so stupid that you can't see the wall, and the ivy on it. Now, Tom Erricker, what do you suppose that to be?"
"How can I tell, about two miles away? Let us go on, and make it out, old chap."
"Not another step. I am not at all sure that I ought to have brought you so far as this. However, you can hold your tongue, I know; and you are upon your honour about all this. Well, that is the wall of an old monastery, more than five hundred years old, I believe, and connected with that ancient chapel on the hills. Naturally, it is all in ruins now, and there has been an attempt to set a mill up in its place."
"The best thing to be done with it," Tom replied, for his nature was not reverent. "But a mill should have paid, if it had any water. Free trade has not had time to destroy the pounders yet, although it has killed the producers. But I don't want to hear about monks and mills. The lovely nuns are more to my taste."
"What nuns could there be in a monastery, Tom? You are even more abroad than usual. But though I have not been near the place, since the time I told you of, and we have nothing to do with that valley now, I have put a few quiet questions here and there, and I find that the old place has been sold to a foreign gentleman, whose name our fine fellows cannot pronounce."