The house
would be haunted with sorrowful memories. It would be time for her to claim
that home which her father had talked of sharing with her in his old age.
She could just faintly remember the house in which she was born--the moat,
the fish-pond, the thick walls of yew, the peacocks and lions cut in box,
of which the gardener who clipped them was so proud. Faintly, faintly, the
picture of the old house came back to her; built of grey stone, and stained
with moss, grave and substantial, occupying three sides of a quadrangle, a
house of many windows, few of which were intended to open, a house of dark
passages, like these in the convent, and flights of shallow steps, and
curious turns and twistings here and there. There were living birds that
sunned their spreading tails and stalked in slow stateliness on the turf
terraces, as well as those peacocks clipped out of yew. The house lay in
a Buckinghamshire valley, shut round and sheltered by hills and coppices,
where there was an abundance of game. Angela had seen the low, cavern-like
larder hung with pheasants and hares.
Her heart yearned towards the old house, so distinctly pictured by memory,
though perchance with some differences from the actual scene.
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