The apartment thus swept by an eye from without was occupied by two persons; they were sitting over dessert, the tablecloth⁴ having been removed in the old-fashioned way.  The fruits were local, consisting of apples, pears, nuts, and such other products of the summer as might be presumed to grow on the estate.  There was strong ale and rum on the table, and but little wine.  Moreover, the appointments of the dining-room were simple and homely⁵ even for the date, betokening⁶ a countrified household of the smaller gentry⁷, without much wealth or ambition—formerly a numerous class, but now in great part ousted⁸ by the territorial⁹ landlords.

 

One of the two sitters was a young lady in white muslin, who listened somewhat impatiently to the remarks of her companion, an elderly, rubicund¹⁰ personage, whom the merest stranger could have pronounced to be her father.  The watcher evinced no signs of moving, and it became evident that affairs were not so simple as they first had seemed.  The tall farmer was in fact no accidental spectator, and he stood by premeditation close to the trunk of a tree, so that had any traveller passed along the road without the park gate, or even round the lawn to the door, that person would scarce have noticed the other, notwithstanding that the gate was quite near at hand, and the park little larger than a paddock.  There was still light enough in the western heaven to brighten faintly one side of the man’s face, and to show against the trunk of the tree behind the admirable cut of his profile; also to reveal that the front of the manor-house, small though it seemed, was solidly built of stone in that never-to-be-surpassed style for the English country residence—the mullioned and transomed Elizabethan.

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