admiration and a youthful sense of delight in the picturesque at the old Hall. The body of the house was a long, plain, two-storeyed building, with a flagged roof and a curious wide, flat portico, supported by two spindleshank wooden windows, beneath which three stone steps, deeply hollowed out and worn by generations of feet, led to the front door. At the west end a gabled wing, flag-roofed like the rest, ran back from the body of the house; and at right angles to this there jutted out westwards a second small wing of the same shape. In these, the oldest portions of the house, traces of former architectural beauties remained in stately Tudor chimneys and two mullioned windows, round which the ivy clustered in huge bushes, long left neglected and untrimmed. At this end of the building a little garden ran underneath the walls, protected from the incursions of intrusive cows by a wall which began towards the back of the house by being very high and ended towards the front by being very low. From the wall to the house the garden had been shut in by palings and a little gate; but these were now much broken and decayed, and afforded small protection to the yews and holly bushes, the little leafless barberry tree and the shabby straggling evergreens, which grew thickly against the weather-stained walls of the old house, choking the broken panes of the lower windows as the ivy did those of the upper ones. It was this western end that was visible from the road, the view of the front being obscured by a long stone-built barn, very old, and erected on foundations older still, about which hung traditions of monkish days.

[Pg 11]

[Pg 11]

If she had seen it at any other time, Olivia would have been crazy with delight at the thought of living in such a place; and even now, cheerless as the immediate prospect was, it gave her a gleam of comfort to reflect that, if she did have to pass the night without any bed amongst the rats, the ancestors of those rats had scampered over the place in the time of Queen Elizabeth.

With some difficulty, Mrs. Wall turned the key in the rusty lock and admitted them. It seemed that she had a grievance in the fact that she had not known on what day they were to arrive. As a matter of fact, she was one of those persons who are never prepared for anything, but Olivia had had no means of learning her peculiarities, and so she met the old woman’s complaints in a humble and apologetic spirit which increased Mrs. Wall’s arrogance.

The entrance hall was low-roofed and square; the walls were covered with 

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