out, Sir Isaac made a kind of whistling between his clenched
teeth. "This bathroom wants refitting anyhow," he said abruptly. "I
daresay Lady Harman would like that room with the bay--but it's
all--small. It's really quite pretty; you've done it cleverly, but--the
size of it! I'd have to throw out a wing. And that you know might spoil
the style. That roof,--a gardener's cottage?... I thought it might be.
What's this other thing here? Old barn. Empty? That might expand a bit.
Couldn't do only just this anyhow."

He walked in front of Mr. Brumley downstairs and still emitting that
faint whistle led the way into the garden. He seemed to regard Mr.
Brumley merely as a source of answers to his questions, and a seller in
process of preparation for an offer. It was clear he meant to make an
offer. "It's not the house I should buy if I was alone in this," he
said, "but Lady Harman's taken a fancy somehow. And it might be
adapted...."

From first to last Mr. Brumley never said a single word about Euphemia
and the young matrimony and all the other memories this house enshrined.
He felt instinctively that it would not affect Sir Isaac one way or the
other. He tried simply to seem indifferent to whether Sir Isaac bought
the place or not. He tried to make it appear almost as if houses like
this often happened to him, and interested him only in the most
incidental manner. They had their proper price, he tried to convey,
which of course no gentleman would underbid.

In the exquisite garden Sir Isaac said: "One might make a very pretty
little garden of this--if one opened it out a bit."

And of the sunken rock-garden: "That might be dangerous of a dark
night."

"I suppose," he said, indicating the hill of pines behind, "one could
buy or lease some of that. If one wanted to throw it into the place and
open out more.

"From my point of view," he said, "it isn't a house. It's----" He sought
in his mind for an expression--"a Cottage Ornay."

This history declines to record either what Mr. Brumley said or what he
did not say.

Sir Isaac surveyed the house thoughtfully for some moments from the turf
edging of the great herbaceous border.

"How far," he asked, "is it from the nearest railway station?..."

Mr. Brumley gave details.

"Four miles. And an infrequent service? Nothing in any way suburban?
Better to motor into Guildford and get the Express. H'm.... And what
sort of people do we get about here?"

Mr. Brumley sketched.