Who could say whether Peter would escape?
Peter had, as he duly reported to his mother and to Betty, a corking time at Thrapstone-Wynyates.
Although an open-air man, an athlete, whose reading had always been confined to those books only that were necessary to his work,--dry law books for the most part,--Peter was far from being insensible to the mellow beauty of the house, and his imagination, uncultivated so far as any training in art or architecture went, was subconsciously stirred by the knowledge that its floors and stone walks and galleries were worn by the feet of a long line of men and women whose loves and passions and hatreds had been worked out there and whose ghostly forms in all the picturesque trappings of several centuries haunted its echoing Hall and looked down from its walls, from their places in gold frames, upon its present occupants.
The atmosphere of Oxford, and especially of his own college, had often spun his thoughts from rowing and other strenuous, splendid, vital things, to the great silent army of dead men whose shouts had rung through the quad and whose rushing feet had gone under the old gate. But this house, standing bravely and with an indescribable sense of responsibility as one of the few rear-guards of those great days of chivalry and gallant fighting for heroic causes, moved him differently. Here women had been and their perfume seemed to hang to the tapestries, and the influence of their hands that could no longer touch was everywhere apparent. Often Peter drew up short, on his way up the wide staircase, to listen for the click of high heels, the tinkle of a spinet and the rattle of dice. Everywhere he went he had a queer but not unpleasant sense of never being alone, just as most men have who walk along the cloisters of a cathedral whose vast array of empty prie-dieus have felt the knees of many generations and in whose lofty roof there is collected the voices of an unnumberable choir.
Up early enough to find the dew still wet on flowers and turf he enjoyed a swim every morning in the Italian bathing pool beneath the Cedar trees with Baby Lennox. Then he either went for a gallop, before breakfast, on one of Lord Shropshire's ponies--again with Baby Lennox--or had a round of golf with her on the workmanlike nine-hole course which had been laid out in the park. She played a neat game, driving straight, approaching deftly and putting like a book,--frequently beating him.