“Your handsome relative asked me to persuade you to marry next month, and I told him point-blank that I would do nothing of the kind. Leslie, do you know that you never see Harry from one weekend to another?”

She had realised that for a long time, and it was a constant subject for self-reproach that she had less and less desire for her fiancé’s society.

“He is really not interested in me, Dick,” she said. “Harry is so absorbed in his treasure hunt and his queer chase after the elixir of life–”

“He’s told you that, has he?” asked Dick quickly. “Why, of course!” she scoffed. “Do you know, Dick, he has almost convinced me that there is something in his idea?”

She waited for him to reply.

“Don’t you think so?”

“In the Life Water – perhaps there is.”

“And in the treasure?” she asked.

“Maybe. Generations of Chelfords have hunted for that wretched gold, and I suppose in the past four hundred years almost as much money has been spent in the search as the treasure is worth! I’m perfectly sure in my own mind that Good Queen Bess of pious memory bagged every bar of it!”

“And I’m perfectly sure she didn’t,” was the surprising reply. “I’ve been reading Elizabethan history very carefully, and the year that your ancestor hid his gold was the year that the Queen was so hard pressed for money that she had to borrow from the Lombards.”

He stopped.

“Is that so?” incredulously.

“Absolutely. And if you weren’t such a sceptic and would read a little more, you would know what any schoolchild could tell you, that in 1582 the Queen was broke. Do you object to that vulgar word?”

“It is a familiar one, at any rate,” he laughed.

They had reached the deep cutting, and he turned to the left, opened a gate, and they walked up a little path towards the ruins of Chelford Abbey.

The moon was showing through a rift in the clouds.

“You ought to see the abbey by moonlight, if you’ve never seen it. It’s rather beautiful,” he said, as he gave her a hand to assist her up the steep path.

As they came in sight of the broken walls and towers of this ancient place of peace, something of the solemnity of the scene entered her heart, and she stood still, looking spellbound upon the wreckage of a once great abbey. The abbey ruins stood on the broadest surface of what was locally known as “The Mound” – the high embankment which ran almost from Fossaway Manor to the road, following the course of the little Ravensrill. Here, if tradition spoke the truth, a place of sacrifice had stood, before the English church had risen in flint, before the Norman monks laid chisel to stone on their great abbey.