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windows above gave upon a little-used formal drawing-room, with a Gothic
fireplace of white stone at one end, and a dim jumble of rich colours
and polished surfaces between that and the big piano at the other. The
room at the back, on this floor, was an equally large and formal
dining-room, gleaming with carved mahogany and fretted plate, used only
on the rare occasions of a dinner-party.

But on the floor above the gracious mistress of the house had her
domain, and here there was enough beauty and colour to make the whole
house live. The front room, cool all summer because it faced north, and
warm all winter, because of the great open fireplace that augmented the
furnace heat, was Alice's sitting-room; comfortable, beautiful, and
exquisitely ordered. None of the usual clutter of the invalid was there.
The fireplace was of plain creamy tiling, the rugs dull-toned upon a
dark, polished floor. There were only two canvases on the dove-gray
walls, and the six or seven photographs that were arranged together on
the top of one of the low, plain, built-in bookcases, were framed alike.
There were no meaningless vases, no jars or trays or plaques or
ornaments in Alice's room. Her flowers she liked to see in shining glass
bowls; her flat-topped desk was severely bare.

But the cretonne that dressed her big comfortable chairs and her couch
was bright with roses and parrots and hollyhocks, and the same cretonne,
with plain net undercurtaining, hung at her four front windows. The room
was big enough to accommodate besides, even with an air of space and
simplicity, the little grand piano that Christopher played for her
almost every night. A great Persian tortoise-shell cat was at home here,
and sometimes Alice had her magnificent parrot besides, hanging himself
upside down on his gaily-painted stand, and veiling the beady, sharp eye
with which he watched her. The indulgent extravagance of her mother had
bound all the books that Alice loved in the same tone of stony-blue
vellum, the countless cushions with which the aching back was so
skillfully packed were of the same dull tone, and it pleased the persons
who loved her to amuse the prisoner sometimes with a ring in which her
favourite note was repeated, or a chain of old lapis-lazuli that made
Alice's appreciative blue eyes more blue.

Back of Alice's room was a den in which Christopher could conduct much
of his personal business, and beyond that was the luxurious bathroom, a