Godfrey looked, and remembering the gentle little woman whose crumbling flesh lay beneath, shivered at the awful and crushing erection above. In life, as he knew, she had been unhappy, but what had she done to deserve such a memorial in death? Still, she was dead, of that there was no doubt, and oh! the sadness of it all.
He went on to the Abbey, resisting a queer temptation to enter the church and look at the tomb of the Plantagenet lady and her unknown knight, who slept there so quietly from year to year, through spring, summer, autumn and winter, for ever and for ever. The front door was locked, so he rang the bell. It was answered by a new servant, rather a forbidding, middle-aged woman with a limp, who informed him that Mr. Knight was out, and notwithstanding his explanations, declined to admit him into the house. Doubtless she thought that a young man, wearing a foreign-looking hat and carrying such a strange long stick, must be a thief, or worse. The end of it was that she slammed the door in his face and shot the old-fashioned bolts.
Then Godfrey bethought him of the other door, that which led into the ancient refectory, which was now used as a schoolroom. This was open, so he went in and, being tired after his long journey, sat himself down in the chair at the end of the old oak table, that same chair in which Isobel had kissed him when he was a little boy. He looked about him vaguely; the place, of course, was much the same as it had been for the last five hundred years, but, as he could see from the names on the copybooks that lay about, the pupils who inhabited it had changed. Of the whole six not one was the same.
Then, perhaps for the first time, he began to understand how variable is the world, a mere passing show in which nothing remains the same, except the houses and the trees. Even these depart, for a cottage with which he had been familiar from his earliest infancy, as he could see through the open door, was pulled down to make room for "improvements," and the great old elm, where the rooks used to build, had been torn up in a gale. Only its ugly stump and projecting roots were left.
So he sat musing there, very depressed at heart, till at length Mrs. Parsons came and discovered him in a half-doze. She, too, was somewhat changed, for of a sudden age had begun to take a hold of her. Her hair was white now, and her plump, round face had withered like a spring apple. Still, she greeted him with the old affection, for which he felt grateful, seeing that it was the first touch of kindness he had known since he set foot on English ground.