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.'" 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.