Explore "The Talleyrand Maxim" by J.S. Fletcher on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Until that afternoon Collingwood had never been in the village to which he was now bending his steps; on that and his previous visits to the Grange he had only passed the end of its one street. Now, descending into it from the slopes of the park, he found it to be little more than a hamlet -- a church, a farmstead or two, a few cottages in their gardens, all clustering about a narrow stream spanned by a high-arched bridge of stone. The _Normandale Arms_, a roomy, old-fashioned place, stood at one end of the bridge, and from the windows of the room into which Collingwood was presently shown he could look out on the stream itself and on the meadows beyond it. A peaceful, pretty, quiet place -- but the gloom which was heavy at the big house or the hill seemed to have spread to everybody that he encountered.
"Bad job, this, sir! " said the landlord, an elderly, serious-faced man, to whom Collingwood had made known his wants, and who had quickly formed the opinion that his guest was of the legal profession. "And a queer one, too! Odd thing, sir, that our old squire, and now the young one, should both have met their deaths in what you might term violent fashion."