In all his former ventures Gardiner had been a tenant; the Bellevue was his own. He had bought the freehold with an opportune legacy, and was spending on it his savings of ten years. According to his usual plan, he went to work first to make the outside attractive. The quadrangle where the pigs had fed was now a lawn, laid out with flower-beds. Of the dilapidated out-buildings, some had been pulled down, others built up and turned into additional bedrooms. Round the three sides of the court ran a piazza with easy-chairs, and tables, and ever more flowers, sure attraction to an English eye.

Inside, his alterations had been more costly. He had put in baths; he had laid on electric light; he had partially refurnished the house--not, however, with conventional "suites" from Liège. They would not have suited the heterogeneous old mansion, on whose lintel was carved the date 1548, and which had been successively convent, country house, farm, and inn. For those who had eyes to see, there was in those days a good deal of fine old furniture, carved presses, beds, and so forth, to be picked up in the farms and the villages. It had been a labor of love for Gardiner to go round bargaining for these things, and bringing them home in triumph to his picturesque old rooms. He made a play of his work, and a pet of his home; he grudged no labor spent in beautifying it; he enjoyed dressing it up, as a child dresses up a doll. In the end, what with polished floors, casement curtains, and Noah's Ark plants in pots, the place looked like a garden-city house, as Lettice unkindly remarked. There was nothing like it in the Ardennes.

His next step was to advertise, a branch of their business on which hotel-keepers in general do not seem to spend their brains. Gardiner did not want a mixed clientele, he was out to attract the poorer gentry, parsons, doctors, schoolmasters, retired colonels and commanders, literary men--the class which he had found pleasantest to deal with. Therefore he put his discreet little paragraphs into such papers as _The Guardian_, _The Church Times_, _The Author_, _The Journal of Education_, _The Spectator_, and various ladies' periodicals. Each advertisement was worded differently, to suit its audience, but all wound up with the formula: "Inclusive terms, 4s. 6d. per day. Fifteen-day excursions, Dover--Rochehaut, second class, £1. 8s. 3d. Exact directions as to journey given." And to meet the demand which arose, he had leaflets printed, giving alternative routes by day or night, plans of stations, prices in detail, travel hints, the minute advice of an old traveler who knows every trick of the journey; leaflets which enabled the greenest novice to face the 

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