Time sped away, until the first of the Herediths was forgotten as completely as though he had never existed; even his dust had been crowded off the shelf of his own vault to make room for the numerous descendants of the prolific and prosperous line he had founded.

But the tablet remained, and the old moat-house he had built still stood.
It was a wonderful old place and a delight to the eye, this mediaeval moat-house of mellow brick, stone facings, high-pitched roof, with terraced gardens and encircling moat.

It had defied Time better than its builder, albeit a little shakily, with signs of decrepitude here and there apparent in the crow's-feet cracks of the brickwork, and decay only too plainly visible in the crazy angles of the tiled roof.

But the ivy which covered portions of the brickwork hid some of the ravages of age, and helped the moat-house to show a brave front to the world, a well-preserved survivor of an ornamental period in a commonplace and ugly generation.
The place looked as though it belonged to the past and the ghosts of the past.

To cross the moat bridge was to step backward from the twentieth century into the seventeenth.