But bad as was the weather, it attracted Ida.  When the heart is heavy and torn by conflicting passions, it seems to answer to the calling of the storm, and to long to lose its petty troubling in the turmoil of the rushing world.  Nature has many moods of which our own are but the echo and reflection, and she can be companionable when all human sympathy must fail.  For she is our mother from whom we come, to whom we go, and her arms are ever open to clasp the children who can hear her voices.  Drawn thereto by an impulse which she could not have analysed, Ida went upstairs, put on a thick pair of boots, a macintosh and an old hat.  Then she sallied out into the wind and wet.  It was blowing big guns, and as the rain whirled down the drops struck upon her face like spray.  She crossed the moat bridge, and went out into the parkland beyond.  The air was full of dead leaves, and the grass rustled with them as though it were alive, for this was the first wind since the frost.  The great boughs of the oaks rattled and groaned above her, and high overhead, among the sullen clouds, a flight of rooks were being blown this way and that.

Ida bent her tall form against the rain and gale, and fought her way through them.  At first she had no clear idea as to where she was going, but presently, perhaps from custom, she took the path that ran across the fields to Honham Church.  It was a beautiful old church, particularly as regards the tower, one of the finest in the county, which had been partially blown down and rebuilt about the time of Charles I. The church itself had originally been founded by the Boissey family, and considerably enlarged by the widow of a de la Molle, whose husband had fallen at Agincourt, “as a memorial for ever.”  There, upon the porch, were carved the “hawks” of the de la Molles, wreathed round with palms of victory; and there, too, within the chancel, hung the warrior’s helmet and his dinted shield.

Nor was he alone, for all around lay the dust of his kindred, come after the toil and struggle of their stormy lives to rest within the walls of that old church.  Some of them had monuments of alabaster, whereon they lay in effigy, their heads pillowed upon that of a conquered Saracen; some had monuments of oak and brass, and some had no monuments at all, for the Puritans had ruthlessly destroyed them.  But they were nearly all there, nearly twenty generations of the bearers of an ancient name, for even those of them who perished on the scaffold had been borne here for burial.  The place was eloquent of the dead and of the mournful lesson of mortality.  From century to century the bearers of that name had walked in these fields, and lived in yonder Castle, and looked upon the familiar swell of yonder ground and the silver flash of yonder river, and now their ashes were gathered here and all the forgotten turmoil of their lives was lost in the silence of those narrow tombs.