Around the site stretched ten thousand acres of good, fat,
unimpeachable soil, plentiful in glades and lawns wherever visible
from the castle-windows, and merging in homely arable where screened
from the too curious eye by ingeniously-contrived plantations.
Some way behind the owner of all this came the second man in the
parish, the rector, the Honourable and Reverend Mr. Oldbourne, a
widower, over stiff and stern for a clergyman, whose severe white
neckcloth, well-kept gray hair, and right-lined face betokened none
of those sympathetic traits whereon depends so much of a parson's
power to do good among his fellow-creatures. The last, far-removed
man of the series--altogether the Neptune of these local primaries--
was the curate, Mr. Alwyn Hill. He was a handsome young deacon with
curly hair, dreamy eyes--so dreamy that to look long into them was
like ascending and floating among summer clouds--a complexion as
fresh as a flower, and a chin absolutely beardless. Though his age
was about twenty-five, he looked not much over nineteen.
The rector had a daughter called Emmeline, of so sweet and simple a
nature that her beauty was discovered, measured, and inventoried by
almost everybody in that part of the country before it was suspected
by herself to exist. She had been bred in comparative solitude; a
rencounter with men troubled and confused her. Whenever a strange
visitor came to her father's house she slipped into the orchard and
remained till he was gone, ridiculing her weakness in apostrophes,
but unable to overcome it.
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