midday
`` Your sarvant , mesters , your sarvant , '' said Feyther Taft in a treble tone , perceiving that he was in company . The aged group , under care of sons or daughters , themselves worn and grey , passed on along the least-winding carriage-road towards the house , where a special table was prepared for them ; while the Poyser party wisely struck across the grass under the shade of the great trees , but not out of view of the house-front , with its sloping lawn and flower-beds , or of the pretty striped marquee at the edge of the lawn , standing at right angles with two larger marquees on each side of the open green space where the games were to be played . The house would have been nothing but a plain square mansion of Queen Anne 's time , but for the remnant of an old abbey to which it was united at one end , in much the same way as one may sometimes see a new farmhouse rising high and prim at the end of older and lower farm-offices . The fine old remnant stood a little backward and under the shadow of tall beeches , but the sun was now on the taller and more advanced front , the blinds were all down , and the house seemed asleep in the hot midday . It made Hetty quite sad to look at it : Arthur must be somewhere in the back rooms , with the grand company , where he could not possibly know that she was come , and she should not see him for a long , long while -- not till after dinner , when they said he was to come up and make a speech . But Hetty was wrong in part of her conjecture . No grand company was come except the Irwines , for whom the carriage had been sent early , and Arthur was at that moment not in a back room , but walking with the rector into the broad stone cloisters of the old abbey , where the long tables were laid for all the cottage tenants and the farm-servants .