first. For the two second
stories were not flush with the front of the house, but reared themselves
from several feet behind, so that the occupants of the bedrooms on the
first story could have used the intervening space as a balcony. Viewed
from the rear, the architectural imperfections of the upper part of the
house were in even stronger contrast with the ornamental first story.
Apparently the impecunious builder, by the time he had reached the rear,
had completely run out of funds, for on the third floor he had failed
altogether to build in one small room, and had left the unfinished
brickwork unplastered.

The large open space between the house and the fir plantation had once
been laid out as an Italian garden at the cost of much time and money,
but Sir Horace Fewbanks had lacked the taste or money to keep it up, and
had allowed it to become a luxuriant wilderness, though the sloping
parterres and the centre flowerbeds still retained traces of their former
beauty. The small lake in the centre, spanned by a rustic hand-bridge,
was still inhabited by a few specimens of the carp family--sole survivors
of the numerous gold-fish with which the original designer of the garden
had stocked the lake.

Sir Horace Fewbanks had rented Riversbrook as a town house for some years
before his death, having acquired the lease cheaply from the previous
possessor, a retired Indian civil servant, who had taken a dislike to the
place because his wife had gone insane within its walls. Sir Horace had
lived much in the house alone, though each London season his daughter
spent a few weeks with him in order to preside over the few Society
functions that her father felt it due to his position to give, and which
generally took the form of solemn dinners to which he invited some of his
brother judges, a few eminent barristers, a few political friends, and
their wives. But rumour had whispered that the judge and his daughter had
not got on too well together--that Miss Fewbanks was a strange girl who
did not care for Society or the Society functions which most girls of her
age would have delighted in, but preferred to spend her time on her
father's country estate, taking an interest in the villagers or walking
the country-side with half a dozen dogs at her heels.

Rumour had not spared the dead judge's name. It was said of him that he
was fond of ladies' society, and especially of ladies belonging to a type
which he could not ask his daughter t