erstood to be a man of mark. She was all impatience to see him, and
had shown it outwardly much more plainly than Elizabeth. How quiet
Elizabeth had been these last days! moving about the house so silently,
with vaguely smiling eyes, like one husbanding her strength before
an ordeal.

What was going to happen? Mrs. Gaddesden was conscious in her own mind
of a strained hush of expectation. But she had never ventured to say a
word to Elizabeth. In half an hour--or less--he would be here. A motor
had been sent to meet the express train at the country town fifteen
miles off. Mrs. Gaddesden looked round her in the warm dusk, as though
trying to forecast how Martindale and its inmates would look to the
new-comer. She saw a room of medium size, which from the end of the
sixteenth century had been known as the Red Drawing Room--a room
panelled in stamped Cordovan leather, and filled with rare and beautiful
things; with ebony cabinets, and fine lacquer; with the rarest of
oriental carpets, with carved chairs, and luxurious sofas. Set here and
there, sparingly, among the shadows, as though in scorn of any vulgar
profusion, the eye caught the gleam of old silver, or rock crystal, or
agate; _bibelots_ collected a hundred and fifty years ago by a Gaddesden
of taste, and still in their original places. Overhead, the uneven
stucco ceiling showed a pattern of Tudor roses; opposite to Mrs.
Gaddesden the wall was divided between a round mirror, in whose depths
she saw herself reflected and a fine Holbein portrait of a man, in a
flat velvet hat on a green background. Over the carved mantelpiece with
its date of 1586, there reigned a Romney portrait--one of the most
famous in existence--of a young girl in black. Elizabeth Merton bore a
curious resemblance to it. Chrysanthemums, white, yellow and purple,
gleamed amid the richness of the room; while the light of the solitary
lamp beside which Mrs. Gaddesden had been sitting with her embroidery,
blended with the orange glow from outside now streaming in through the
unshuttered windows, to deepen a colour effect of extraordinary beauty,
produced partly by time, partly by the conscious effort of a dozen
generations.

And from the window, under the winter sunset, Mrs. Gaddesden could see,
at right angles to her on either side, the northern and southern wings
of the great house; the sloping lawns; the river winding through the
park; the ivy-grown church among the trees; the distant woods and
pl