n's small domain was called The Lawn, and consisted
of something over half an acre of flower-garden and shrubbery, a
two-stall stable and coach-house, a conservatory and fernery, and a
moderate-sized house in the gothic or mediaeval style, with mullioned
windows in the dining-room and oriels in the best bedroom, and with a
great deal of unnecessary stone-work and wooden excrescence in every
direction.

The interior of Mr. Sheldon's dwelling bore no trace of that solid
old-fashioned clumsiness which had distinguished his house in
Fitzgeorge-street. Having surrendered his ancestral chairs and tables
in liquidation of his liabilities, Philip Sheldon was free to go with
the times, and had furnished his gothic villa in the most approved
modern style, but without any attempt at artistic grace or adornment.
All was bright, and handsome, and neat, and trim; but the brightness
and the neatness savoured just a little of furnished apartments at the
seaside, and the eye sought in vain for the graceful disorder of an
elegant home. The dining-room was gorgeous with all the splendour of
new mahogany and crimson morocco; the drawing-room was glorified by big
looking-glasses, and the virginal freshness of gilt frames on which the
feet of agile house-fly or clumsy blue-bottle had never rested. The
crimsons, and blues, and greens, and drabs of the Brussels carpets
retained the vivid brightness of the loom. The drops of the chandeliers
twinkled like little stars in the sunshine; the brass birdcages were
undimmed by any shadow of dulness. To Georgy's mind the gothic villa
was the very perfection of a dwelling-place. The Barlingford
housekeepers were wont to render their homes intolerable by extreme
neatness. Georgy still believed in the infallibility of her native
town, and the primness of Barlingford reigned supreme in the gothic
villa. There were no books scattered on the polished walnut-wood tables
in the drawing-room, no cabinets crammed with scraps of old china, no
pictures, no queer old Indian feather-screens, no marvels of Chinese
carving in discoloured ivory; none of those traces which the footsteps
of the "collector" leave behind him. Mr. Sheldon had no leisure for
collecting; and Georgy preferred the gaudy pink-and-blue vases of a
Regent-street china-shop to all the dingy _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of a
Wedgwood, or the quaint shepherds and shepherdesses of Chelsea. As for
books, were there not four or five resplendent volumes primly dispos