preparation now sweeping through the
house.

The famous hall to which Elsmere at once drew Langham's attention was,
however, in no way remarkable for size or height. It told comparatively
little of seignorial dignity, but it was as though generation after
generation had employed upon its perfecting the craft of its most
delicate fingers, the love of its most fanciful and ingenious spirits.
Overhead, the stucco-work ceiling, covered with stags and birds and
strange heraldic creatures unknown to science, had the deep creamy tint,
the consistency and surface of antique ivory. From the white and gilt
frieze beneath, untouched, so Robert explained, since the Jacobean days
when it was first executed, hung Renaissance tapestries which would have
made the heart's delight of any romantic child, so rich they were in
groves of marvellous trees hung with red and golden fruits, in
far-reaching palaces and rock-built citadels, in flying shepherdesses
and pursuing shepherds. Between the tapestries, again, there were
breadths of carved panelling, crowded with all things round and sweet,
with fruits and flowers and strange musical instruments, with flying
cherubs, and fair faces in laurel-wreathed medallions; while in the
middle of the wall a great oriel window broke the dim venerable surfaces
of wood and tapestry with stretches of jewelled light. Tables crowded
with antiques, with Tanagra figures or Greek vases, with Florentine
bronzes or specimens of the wilful vivacious wood-carving of
seventeenth-century Spain, stood scattered on the Persian carpets. And,
to complete the whole, the gardeners had just been at work on the
corners of the hall, and of the great window, so that the hard-won
subtleties of man's bygone handiwork, with which the splendid room was
encrusted from top to bottom, were masked and relieved here and there by
the careless easy splendour of flowers, which had but to bloom in order
to eclipse them all.

Robert was at home in the great pile, where for many months he had gone
freely in and out on his way to the library, and the housekeeper only
met him to make an apology for her working dress, and to hand over to
him the keys of the library bookcases, with the fretful comment that
seemed to have in it the ghostly voice of generations of housemaids, 'Oh
lor', sir, they are a trouble, them books!'

From the drawing-rooms, full of a more modern and less poetical
magnificence, where Langham turned restless and refractor