e--furniture, pictures, sheets, towels and kitchen clutter. I've
only got six days' leave, and I want all the worries, as far as I am
concerned, settled and done with before I go. So you'll have to buck
up, Mr. Spooner. If you say you can't do it, I'll put the business by
telephone into the hands of a London agent."

It took Mr. Spooner nearly a quarter of an hour to recover his breath,
gain a grasp of the situation and assemble his business wits.

"Of course I'll carry out your instructions, Mr. Trevor," he said at
last. "You can safely leave the matter in our hands. But, although it
is against my business interests, pray let me beg you to reconsider
your decision. It is such a beautiful home, your grandfather, the
Bishop's, before you."

"He bought it pretty cheap, didn't he, somewhere in the 'seventies?"

"I forget the price he paid for it, but I could look it up. Of course
we were the agents."

"And then it was let to some dismal people until my father died and my
mother took it over. I'm sorry I can't get sentimental about it, as if
it were an ancestral hall, Mr. Spooner. I want to get rid of the
place, because I hate the sight of it."

"It would be presumptuous of me to say anything more," answered the
old-fashioned country auctioneer.

"Say what you like, Mr. Spooner," laughed Doggie in his disarming way.
"We're old friends. But send in your people this afternoon to start on
inventories and measuring up, or whatever they do, and I'll look round
to-morrow and select the bits I may want to keep. You'll see after the
storing of them, won't you?"

"Of course, Mr. Trevor."

Mr. Spooner drove away in his little car, a much dazed man.

Like the rest of Durdlebury and the circumjacent county, he had
assumed that when the war was over Mr. James Marmaduke Trevor would
lead his bride from the Deanery into Denby Hall, where the latter, in
her own words, would proceed to make things hum.

"My dear," said he to his wife at luncheon, "you could have knocked me
over with a feather. What he's doing it for, goodness knows. I can
only assume that he has grown so accustomed to the destruction of
property in France, that he has got bitten by the fever."

"Perhaps Peggy Conover has turned him down," suggested his wife, who,
much younger than he, employed more modern turns of speech. "And I
shouldn't wonder if she has. Since the war girls aren't on the look
out for pretty monkeys."

"If Miss Conover thinks she has got h