d have interpreted the architectural and
decorative features faintly disclosed by lamp and fire. But the house and
its contents--the house and its condition--were strangely at war.
Everywhere the seemly lines and lovely ornament due to its original
builders were spoilt or obliterated by the sordid confusion to which some
modern owner had brought it. It was not a house apparently, so far as its
present use went, but a warehouse. There was properly speaking no
furniture in it; only a multitude of packing-cases, boxes of all shapes
and sizes, piled upon or leaning against each other. The hall was choked
with them, so that only a gangway a couple of yards wide was left,
connecting the entrance door with the gallery and staircase. And any one
stepping into the gallery, which with its high arched roof ran the whole
length of the old house, would have seen it also disfigured in the same
way. The huge deal cases stood on bare boards; the splendid staircase was
carpetless. Nothing indeed could have been more repellant than the
general aspect, the squalid disarray of Threlfall Tower, as seen from the
inside, on this dreary evening.

The fact impressed itself on Mrs. Dixon as she turned back from the
window toward her husband.

She looked round her sulkily.

"Well, I've done my best, Tammas, and I daursay yo' have too. But it's
not a place to bring a leddy to--an' that's the truth."

"Foaks mun please theirsels," said Dixon with the same studied mildness
as before. Then, having at last made the logs burn, as he hoped, with
some brightness, he proceeded to sweep up the wide stone hearth. "Is t'
rooms upstairs finished?"

"Aye--hours ago." His wife dropped with a weary gesture upon a chair near
the fire. "Tammas, yo' know it's a queer thing awthegither! What are they
coomin' here for at all?"

"Well, master's coom into t' property, an' I'm thinkin' it's nobbut his
dooty to coom an' see it. It's two year sen he came into 't; an' he's
done nowt but tak' t' rents, an' turn off men, an' clutter up t' house
wi' boxes, iver sense. It's time, I'm thinkin', as he did coom an' luke
into things a bit."

Thomas rose from his knees, and stood warming himself at the fire, while
he looked pensively round him. He was as tired as his wife, and quite as
mistrustful of what might be before them; but he was not going to confess
it. He was a lean and gaunt fellow, blue-eyed and broad-shouldered, of a
Cumbria type commonly held to be of Scandina