“It’s the chimes of St. Michael’s. You’ll never want a clock here, the bells ring every quarter, just as they’ve rung for the last hundred years; they’re the first thing I remember, and maybe they’ll be the last. Well, come on and I’ll show you some more of the house, if you’re not tired and don’t want to rest.”

She led the way from the room and along the corridor, opening doors and shewing rooms, and then up a back stairs to the top floor beneath the attics.

The house seemed to grow in age as they ascended. Not a door in Vernons was exactly true in line; the old house settling itself down quietly through the years and assisted perhaps by the great earthquake, though that had left it practically unharmed, shewed that deviation from the right line in cornice and wainscoting and door space, which is the hall mark left on architecture by genius or age. The builders 102 of the Parthenon knew this, the builders of Vernons did not— Age supplied their defects.

102

Up here the flooring of the passages and rooms frankly sagged in places, and the beams bellied downwards ever so little and the ceilings bowed.

“I’ve seen all these bed-rooms filled in the old days,” said Miss Pinckney. “We had wounded soldiers here in the war. What Vernons hasn’t seen of American history isn’t worth telling—much. Here’s the nursery.”

She opened a door with bottle-glass panels, real old bottle-glass worth its weight in minted silver, and shewed Phyl into a room.

“This is the nursery,” said she.

It was a large room with two windows, and the windows were barred to keep small people from tumbling into the garden. The place had the air of silence and secrecy that haunts rooms long closed and deserted. An old-fashioned paper shewing birds of Paradise covered the walls. A paper so old that Miss Pinckney remembered it when, as a child, she had come here to tea with the Mascarene children, so good that the dye of the gorgeous Paradise birds had scarcely faded.

A beam of morning sun struck across the room, a great solid, golden bar of light. Phyl, as she stood for a moment on the threshold, saw motes dancing in the bar of light; the air was close and almost stuffy owing to the windows being shut. A rocking-horse, much, much the worse for wear stood in one corner, he was piebald and the beam of light just failed to touch his brush-like tail. A Noah’s Ark 103 of the good 

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