indulge the passion he had
conceived for Amershott Old Grange.

He used to say he would never have been happy again if he couldn't have
had Amershott Old Grange. Everything about it seemed propitious. They had
found it by a happy accident when they weren't looking for it, weren't
thinking of it, when they were trying to get out of Sussex and back to
London after a long day's motoring in search of houses. Nothing that
Essex or Kent or Buckinghamshire (Hertfordshire was ruled out by the
presence in it of the Registrar) or Surrey or Hampshire or Sussex, so
far, could do had satisfied them, and Jevons was beginning to talk rather
wildly about Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire and Wilts, and even Devon
and Cornwall, when they lost their way in the cross-country roads between
Midhurst and Petworth and so came upon Amershott Old Grange. It was
hidden behind an old rose-red brick wall in a lane, and it was only by
standing up in the motorcar that they caught sight of its long line of
red-tiled dormer windows. The very notice-board was hidden, staggering
back in an ivy bush that topped the wall.

"I won't have a house," said Jimmy, "that's a day older than Queen Anne."
No more would Viola.

And the Old Grange was not a day older than Queen Anne or a day younger.
It was the most perfect specimen of a Queen Anne house you could have
wished to see--the long, straight front, the slender door, the two
storeys with their rows of straight, flat windows and the steep brows of
the dormers over them. It was all rose-red brick and rose-red tiles, with
roses and clematis bursting out in crimson and purple all over the front.
It stood at right angles to the wall and to the lane, and there was a
long grass-garden in front of it, with walls all round and herbaceous
borders under the walls; and from the high postern door in the outer wall
opening to the lane a wide flagged path went all the way in front of the
house to the door in the inner wall that led into the kitchen garden and
the orchard. Further down the lane were the doors of the courtyard at the
back of the house where the outhouses and the stables and the dovecot
were; and beyond the courtyard there was a paddock, and you would have
thought that was enough. But, besides his Queen Anne house and his
gardens and his orchard and his courtyard and his dovecot and his
paddock, Jimmy had acquired ten acres of moorland, to say nothing of a
belt of pinewood that ran the whole length of his es