About forty-eight hours later Godfrey arrived duly at the little Essex station three miles from Monk's Acre. There was nobody to meet him, which was not strange, as the hour of his coming was unknown. Still, unreasonable as it might be, the contrast between the warmth and affection that had distinguished his departure, and the cold vacuum that greeted his arrival, chilled him. He said a few words to the grumpy old porter who was the sole occupant of the platform, but that worthy, although he knew him well enough, did not seem to realise that he had ever been away. During the year in which so many things had happened to Godfrey nothing at all had happened to the porter, and therefore he did not appreciate the lapse of time.
Leaving his baggage to be brought by the carrier's cart, Godfrey took the alpenstock that, in a moment of enthusiasm, the guide had given him as a souvenir of his great adventure, and started for home. It was a very famous alpenstock, which this guide and his father before him had used all their lives, one that had been planted in the topmost snows of every peak in Switzerland. Indeed the names of the most unclimbable of these, together with the dates of their conquest by its owners, sometimes followed by crosses to show that on such or such an expedition life had been lost, were burnt into the tough wood with a hot iron. As the first of these dates was as far back as 1831, Godfrey valued this staff highly, and did not like to leave it to the chances of the carrier's cart.
His road through the fields ran past Hawk's Hall, of which he observed with a thrill of dismay, that the blinds were drawn as though in it someone lay dead. There was no reason why he should have been dismayed, since he had heard that Isobel had gone away to somewhere in "Ameriky," as Mrs. Parsons had expressed it in a brief and illspelt letter, and that Sir John was living in town. Yet the sight depressed him still further with its suggestion of death, or of separation, which is almost as bad, for, be it remembered, he was at an age when such impressions come home.
After leaving the Hall with its blinded and shuttered windows, his quickest road to the Abbey House ran through the churchyard. Here the first thing that confronted him was a gigantic monument, of which the new marble glittered in the afternoon sun. It was a confused affair, and all he made out of it, without close examination, was a life-sized angel with an early-Victorian countenance, leaning against the broken stump of an oak tree and scattering from a basket, of the kind that is used to collect nuts or windfall apples, on to a sarcophagus beneath a profusion of marble roses, some of which seemed to have been arrested and frozen in mid-air. He glanced at the inscription in gold letters. It was "To the beloved memory of Lady Jane Blake, wife of Sir John Blake, Bart., J.P., and daughter of the Right Hon. The Earl of Lynfield, whose bereaved husband erected this monument--'Her husband ... praiseth her.'"