“I wonder if my father could see this wall from the room where he died? I expect he could.” He walked on into the outskirts of the town. The lane which he followed emerged into a narrow road, where the chilly, newly-budded hedges alternated with small stone houses, standing back from the thoroughfare and approached by little stone paths. He caught sight of an old man, sitting on a trim bench in one of those little gardens, with a look of the most supreme contentment on his face as he smoked his pipe and watched the passersby. There was a white cat at his feet and a clump of daffodils in the flowerbed beside him; and bathed as he was in the mellow afternoon light, his leathery, secretive, roguish countenance⁠—he might have been the owner of some little shop or a retired gardener⁠—seemed to gather to itself the whole long history of Ramsgard and its famous school, from the time when King Aethelwolf was buried in the Abbey to the time Miss Gault’s father became headmaster!