blank
wall for his adventure to have brought him to break his nose against.
It had in fact, as he was now aware, filled all the approaches, hovered
in the court as he passed, hung on the staircase as he mounted, sounded
in the grave rumble of the old bell, as little electric as possible, of
which Chad, at the door, had pulled the ancient but neatly-kept tassel;
it formed in short the clearest medium of its particular kind that he
had ever breathed. He would have answered for it at the end of a
quarter of an hour that some of the glass cases contained swords and
epaulettes of ancient colonels and generals; medals and orders once
pinned over hearts that had long since ceased to beat; snuff-boxes
bestowed on ministers and envoys; copies of works presented, with
inscriptions, by authors now classic. At bottom of it all for him was
the sense of her rare unlikeness to the women he had known. This sense
had grown, since the day before, the more he recalled her, and had been
above all singularly fed by his talk with Chad in the morning.
Everything in fine made her immeasurably new, and nothing so new as the
old house and the old objects. There were books, two or three, on a
small table near his chair, but they hadn't the lemon-coloured covers
with which his eye had begun to dally from the hour of his arrival and
to the opportunity of a further acquaintance with which he had for a
fortnight now altogether succumbed. On another table, across the room,
he made out the great _Revue_; but even that familiar face, conspicuous
in Mrs. Newsome's parlours, scarce counted here as a modern note. He
was sure on the spot--and he afterwards knew he was right--that this
was a touch of Chad's own hand. What would Mrs. Newsome say to the
circumstance that Chad's interested "influence" kept her paper-knife in
the _Revue_? The interested influence at any rate had, as we say, gone
straight to the point--had in fact soon left it quite behind.

She was seated, near the fire, on a small stuffed and fringed chair one
of the few modern articles in the room, and she leaned back in it with
her hands clasped in her lap and no movement, in all her person, but
the fine prompt play of her deep young face. The fire, under the low
white marble, undraped and academic, had burnt down to the silver ashes
of light wood, one of the windows, at a distance, stood open to the
mildness and stillness, out of which, in the short pauses, came the
faint sound, pl