e engravings of
Pisa and of Rome, and pastel portraits in oval frames; the rest of the
whity brown panelled wall space hidden by book-cases. These surmounted by
softly shining, pearl-grey Chinese godlings, monsters, philosophers and
saints, the shelves below packed with neatly ranged books.

A dusky room, in spite of its rounded, outstanding sash-windows, two on
either side the glass door; the air of it holding, in permanent solution,
an odour of leather-bound volumes. A place, in short, which, though not
inhospitable, imposed itself, its qualities and traditions, to an extent
impossible for any save the most thick-skinned and thick-witted wholly to
ignore or resist.

Young Tom Verity, having no convenient armour-plating of stupidity,
suffered its influence intimately as--looking about him with quick
enquiring glances--he followed the man-servant across it between the
dumpy pillars. He felt self-conscious and disquieted, as by a smile of
silent amusement upon some watchful elderly face. So impressed, indeed,
was he that, on reaching the door, he paused, letting the man pass on
alone to announce him. He wanted time in which to get over this queer
sensation of shyness, before presenting himself to the company assembled,
there, in the garden outside.

Yet he was well aware that the prospect out of doors--its amplitude of
mellow sunlight and of space, its fair windless calm in which no leaf
stirred--was far more attractive than the room in the doorway of which he
thus elected to linger.

For the glass-door gave directly on to an extensive lawn, set out,
immediately before the house front, with scarlet and crimson geraniums in
alternating square and lozenge-shaped beds. Away on the right a couple of
grey-stemmed ilex trees--the largest in height and girth Tom had ever
seen--cast finely vandyked and platted shadow upon the smooth turf.
Beneath them, garden chairs were stationed and a tea-table spread, at
which four ladies sat--one, the elder, dressed in crude purple, the other
three, though of widely differing ages and aspect, in light coloured
summer gowns.

To the left of the lawn, a high plastered wall--masked by hollies, bay,
yew, and at the far end by masses of airy, pink-plumed tamarisk--shut off
the eastward view. But straight before him all lay open, "clean away to
the curve of the world" as he told himself, not without a pull of emotion
remembering his impending voyage. For, about sixty yards distant, the
lawn