like a German bedroom, not like a nice cosy English room. Thus the place
where a fireplace would naturally have been was taken up by a large
china stove; and instead of a big brass double bed there were two low
narrow box beds. On her husband's bed was a huge eiderdown, and under
that only a sheet--no blankets at all! Polly hoped that this horrid fact
would never be known in Witanbury. It would make quite a talk.

There was linoleum on the floor instead of a carpet, and there was very
little ease about the one armchair which her husband had grudgingly
allowed her to have up here.

Close to his bed, at right angles to it, was a huge black and green
safe. That safe, as Polly well knew, had cost a very great deal of
money, enough money to have furnished this room in really first-class
style, with good Wilton pile carpet all complete.

But Manfred had chosen to furnish the room in his own style, and it was
a style to which Polly could never grow accustomed. It outraged all the
instinctive prejudices and conventions inherited from her respectable,
lower middle-class forbears. Instead of being good substantial mahogany
or walnut, it was some queerly veined light-coloured wood, and decorated
with the strangest coloured rectangular designs, and painted--well, with
nightmare oddities, that's what she called them! And she was not far
wrong, for all down one side of the wardrobe waddled a procession of
bright green ducks.

Polly could never make her husband out. He was so careful, so--so
miserly in some ways, so wildly extravagant in others. All this
furniture had come from Germany, and must have cost a pretty penny. It
was true that he had got it, or so he assured her, with very heavy
discount off--and that no doubt was correct.

The only ornaments in the room, if ornaments they could be called, were
faded photographs and two oleographs in gilt frames. One of the
photographs was the portrait of Manfred's first wife, a very plain, fat
woman. Then there were tiny cartes of Manfred's father and
mother--regular horrors they must have been, so Polly thought
resentfully. The oleographs were views of Heidelberg and of the Kiel
Canal.

Poor Polly! She had been sent up here, just as if she was a little girl
in disgrace, about half an hour ago--simply for having told her own
sister Jenny, who was useful maid to Miss Haworth at the Deanery, that
Manfred had spent yesterday at Southampton. He had gone on smiling quite
affably as long