"What is it?"
"It's in two words," said the other. "The new squire was quite poor
when he bought. The old squire was quite rich when he sold."
Horne Fisher looked at him thoughtfully as he turned away abruptly
and busied himself with the papers on his desk. Then Fisher uttered
a short phrase of thanks and farewell, and went out into the street,
still very thoughtful.
His reflection seemed to end in resolution, and, falling into a more
rapid stride, he passed out of the little town along a road leading
toward the gate of the great park, the country seat of Sir Francis
Verner. A glitter of sunlight made the early winter more like a late
autumn, and the dark woods were touched here and there with red and
golden leaves, like the last rays of a lost sunset. From a higher
part of the road he had seen the long, classical facade of the great
house with its many windows, almost immediately beneath him, but
when the road ran down under the wall of the estate, topped with
towering trees behind, he realized that it was half a mile round to
the lodge gates. After walking for a few minutes along the lane,
however, he came to a place where the wall had cracked and was in
process of repair. As it was, there was a great gap in the gray
masonry that looked at first as black as a cavern and only showed at
a second glance the twilight of the twinkling trees.
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