place, and not a gentleman or half a gentleman's house to be seen excepting one — to be presumed the Parsonage — within a stone's throw of the said knoll and church. I found myself, in short, in Thornton Lacey.”

“It sounds like it,” said Edmund; “but which way did you turn after passing Sewell's farm?”

“I answer no such irrelevant and insidious questions; though were I to answer all that you could put in the course of an hour, you would never be able to prove that it was not Thornton Lacey — for such it certainly was.”

“You inquired, then?”

“No, I never inquire.

But I told a man mending a hedge that it was Thornton Lacey, and he agreed to it.”