rious square turrets, with its tremendous ground floor
rambling away in wings on every side, with its deep upper and lower
verandas, looked out upon by a multitude of long French windows, seemed
too large, too strangely imposing for a structure of wood. But whatever
of original ugliness had been there was hidden now under a splendid
tapestry of vines, and Flora, looking up at the rose and honeysuckle
that panoplied its front, felt her throat swell for sheer delight.

For a moment after they had left the carriage they stood together in the
porte-cochere, looking around them. Then half wistfully, half
humorously, Mrs. Herrick turned to Flora. "I do hope you won't want to
buy it!"

"Oh, I'm afraid I shall," Flora murmured, "that is, if--" She left her
sentence hanging, as one who would have said "if I come out of this
alive," and Mrs. Herrick, with a quick start of protection, laid her
hand on Flora's arm.

"If you must," she said lightly, "if you do buy it, then at least I
shall know it is in good hands."

Flora gave her a look of gratitude, not so much for the slight kindness
of her words as for the great kindness of her attitude in thus so
readily resuming the first assumption on which her presence there had
been invited. That was the house itself.

It was plain to Flora from the moment she set foot over the threshold
that the house was to be no mean ally of theirs, but Mrs. Herrick was
making it help them doubly in their hard interval of waiting. Alone
together with unspoken, unspeakable things between them--things that
for mere decency or honor could not be uttered--with nothing but these
to think of, nothing but each other to look at, they must yet, in sheer
desperation and suspense, have inevitably burst out with question or
confession, had not the great house been there to interpose its
personality. And the way Mrs. Herrick was making the most of that! The
way immediately, even before she had shown anything, she began to
revivify the spirit of the place, as the two women stood with their hats
not yet off in the room that was to be Flora's, talking and looking out
upon the lawn!

With her silences, with her expressive self as well as with her words,
Mrs. Herrick was reanimating it all the while they lunched and rested,
still in the upper-rooms overlooking the garden. And later, when they
made the tour of the house, she began unwinding from her memory
incidents of its early beginnings, pieces of its intimate,