cold
lunch for him and his friends, and I am sure he would wish it to be
offered."

Moved with curiosity to this minor adventure, Flambeau assented
gracefully, and followed the old man, who ushered him ceremoniously into
the long, lightly panelled room. There was nothing very notable about
it, except the rather unusual alternation of many long, low windows with
many long, low oblongs of looking-glass, which gave a singular air
of lightness and unsubstantialness to the place. It was somehow like
lunching out of doors. One or two pictures of a quiet kind hung in the
corners, one a large grey photograph of a very young man in uniform,
another a red chalk sketch of two long-haired boys. Asked by Flambeau
whether the soldierly person was the prince, the butler answered shortly
in the negative; it was the prince's younger brother, Captain Stephen
Saradine, he said. And with that the old man seemed to dry up suddenly
and lose all taste for conversation.

After lunch had tailed off with exquisite coffee and liqueurs,
the guests were introduced to the garden, the library, and the
housekeeper--a dark, handsome lady, of no little majesty, and rather
like a plutonic Madonna. It appeared that she and the butler were
the only survivors of the prince's original foreign menage the other
servants now in the house being new and collected in Norfolk by the
housekeeper. This latter lady went by the name of Mrs. Anthony, but
she spoke with a slight Italian accent, and Flambeau did not doubt that
Anthony was a Norfolk version of some more Latin name. Mr. Paul,
the butler, also had a faintly foreign air, but he was in tongue and
training English, as are many of the most polished men-servants of the
cosmopolitan nobility.

Pretty and unique as it was, the place had about it a curious luminous
sadness. Hours passed in it like days. The long, well-windowed rooms
were full of daylight, but it seemed a dead daylight. And through all
other incidental noises, the sound of talk, the clink of glasses, or the
passing feet of servants, they could hear on all sides of the house the
melancholy noise of the river.

"We have taken a wrong turning, and come to a wrong place," said Father
Brown, looking out of the window at the grey-green sedges and the silver
flood. "Never mind; one can sometimes do good by being the right person
in the wrong place."

Father Brown, though commonly a silent, was an oddly sympathetic little
man, and in those few but end