thing you have on your hands which I can never quite see
the necessity for,' said Downe, with good-humoured freedom. 'What the
deuce do you want to build that new mansion for, when you have already
got such an excellent house as the one you live in?'

Barnet's face acquired a warmer shade of colour; but as the question had
been idly asked by the solicitor while regarding the surrounding flocks
and fields, he answered after a moment with no apparent embarrassment -

'Well, we wanted to get out of the town, you know: the house I am living
in is rather old and inconvenient.' Mr. Downe declared that he had
chosen a pretty site for the new building. They would be able to see for
miles and miles from the windows. Was he going to give it a name? He
supposed so.

Barnet thought not. There was no other house near that was likely to be
mistaken for it. And he did not care for a name.

'But I think it has a name!' Downe observed: 'I went past--when was
it?--this morning; and I saw something,--"Chateau Ringdale," I think it
was, stuck up on a board!'

'It was an idea she--we had for a short time,' said Barnet hastily. 'But
we have decided finally to do without a name--at any rate such a name as
that. It must have been a week ago that you saw it. It was taken down
last Saturday . . . Upon that matter I am firm!' he added grimly.

Downe murmured in an unconvinced tone that he thought he had seen it
yesterday.

Talking thus they drove into the town. The street was unusually still
for the hour of seven in the evening; an increasing drizzle had prevailed
since the afternoon, and now formed a gauze across the yellow lamps, and
trickled with a gentle rattle down the heavy roofs of stone tile, that
bent the house-ridges hollow-backed with its weight, and in some
instances caused the walls to bulge outwards in the upper story. Their
route took them past the little town-hall, the Black-Bull Hotel, and
onward to the junction of a small street on the right, consisting of a
row of those two-and-two windowed brick residences of no particular age,
which are exactly alike wherever found, except in the people they
contain.

'Wait--I'll drive you up to your door,' said Barnet, when Downe prepared
to alight at the corner. He thereupon turned into the narrow street,
when the faces of three little girls could be discerned close to the
panes of a lighted window a few yards ahead, surmounted by that of a
young matron, the gaze of