s not mine!'
Many people might have found in the singular unhomeliness of the big
house a just cause for withholding their affection from it, but Peter
had always loved it. Every corner of the place was full of memories to
him. Here was the wall of the terrace off which, as a little boy, he
used to jump, making horrible heelmarks in the turf where he alighted;
and there was the stone summer-house, built after the fashion of a
small Greek temple, but only interesting to Peter Ogilvie from the fact
that he used to keep his wheelbarrow and garden tools there. He
remembered the first day when it had suddenly struck him that the
geometrically shaped flower-beds were designed after a pattern, and he
had counted, with his nurse, the loops and circles in the design.
There, again, were the fountains with their silver spray, in whose
basins, by the inexorable but utterly unintelligible law of the
nursery, he had never been allowed to play. Here was the clock on the
tower which used to boom out every hour as it passed, but of whose
strokes he was never conscious except when he heard it at night.
Passing inside the house was the hall, with its big round tables by the
fire, and beyond that was the library and his mother's drawing-room;
while in the older wings of the house were the ballroom where Charles
I. had banqueted, and the Sevres sitting-room, so called from the china
plaques let into the mantelpiece, where he had made love.

'I hope, if my brother is alive, that he is a good sort of chap,' said
Peter.

He breakfasted in the tapestried room which he had ordered to be kept
open for him, and then went into the library to write his letters. He
had a hundred things to do. At lunch-time he interviewed his steward,
his agent, his stud-groom, and the other heads of departments of a
large estate. The horses were to be sold with the exception of a few
favourites. The gardens were to be kept up as usual.

Some dogs of his mother's would be cared for, his bankers would pay the
usual subscriptions to local charities, and the almshouses in the
village were to be maintained as they had always been maintained.

After lunch Mr. Semple, the lawyer, arrived. He was a pleasant man and
a keen botanist. The gardens at Bowshott were a delight to him, and
Peter had often found him good company over a cigar in the evenings.
Mr. Semple was one of those who had throughout urged secrecy and
caution in the matter of the late Mrs. Ogilvie's