“When I asked you to walk with me this afternoon, Philip, I, if my memory does not deceive me, was careful to say that I had no wish to interfere with any prior engagement.  I was aware how little interest, compared to your cousin George, you take in the estate, and I had no wish to impose an uncongenial task.  But, as you kindly volunteered to accompany me, I regret that you did not find it convenient to be punctual to the time you fixed.  I have now waited for you for seventeen minutes, and let me tell you that at my time of life I cannot afford to lose seventeen minutes.  May I ask what has delayed you?”

This long speech had given Philip the opportunity of recovering the breath that he had lost in running home.  He replied promptly—­

“I have been lunching with Miss Lee.”

“Oh, indeed, then I no longer wonder that you kept me waiting, and I must say that in this particular I commend your taste.  Miss Lee is a young lady of good family, good manners, and good means.  If her estate went with this property it would complete as pretty a five thousand acres of mixed soil as there is in the county.  Those are beautiful old meadows of hers, beautiful.  Perhaps——­” but here the old man checked himself.

On leaving the house they had passed together down a walk called the tunnel walk, on account of the arching boughs of the lime-trees that interlaced themselves overhead.  At the end of this avenue, and on the borders of the lake, there stood an enormous but still growing oak, known as Caresfoot’s Staff.  It was the old squire’s favourite tree, and the best topped piece of timber for many miles round.

“I wonder,” said Philip, by way of making a little pleasant conversation, “why that tree was called Caresfoot’s Staff.”

“Your ignorance astonishes me, Philip, but I suppose that there are some people who can live for years in a place and yet imbibe nothing of its traditions.  Perhaps you know that the monks were driven out of these ruins by Henry VIII.  Well, on the spot where that tree now stands there grew a still greater oak, a giant tree, its trunk measured sixteen loads of timber; which had, as tradition said, been planted by the first prior of the Abbey when England was still Saxon.  The night the monks left a great gale raged over England.  It was in October, when the trees were full of leaf, and its fiercest gust tore the great oak from its roothold, and flung it into the lake.  Look! do you see that rise in the sand, there, by the edge of the deep pool, in the eight foot water?  That is there it is supposed to lie.  Well, the whole country-side said that it was a sign that the monks had gone for ever from Bratham Abbey, and the country-side was right.  But when your ancestor, old yeoman Caresfoot, bought this place and came to live here, in a year when there was a great black frost that set the waters of the lake like one of the new-fangled roads, he asked his neighbours, ay, and his labouring folk, to come and dine with him