Here and in the woods adjoining youths and
maidens for three hundred years had walked and made love, for, though
the existing house was new, it stood on the site of a far older
building. Dead men and women, lord and churl, gone to
indistinguishable dust, or even beyond that--gone perhaps, into
vapour and gas, which had been blown to New Zealand, and become men
and women again--had burned with passion here, and vowed a union
which was to last beyond the Judgment Day. They wept here,
quarrelled here, rushed again into one another's arms here, swore to
one another here, when Henry the Eighth was king; and they wept here,
quarrelled here, embraced here, swore here, in exactly the same mad
fashion, when William the Fourth sat upon the throne. Half-way up
the avenue was a stone pillar commanding a gentle descent, one way to
the Hall, and the other way to the lodge. It set forth the anguish
of a former lord of the time of Queen Anne, who had lost his wife
when she was twenty-six years old. She was beneath him in rank, but
very beautiful, and his affection for her had fought with and
triumphed over the cruel opposition of father, mother, and relations,
who had other designs.
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