e had less
objection to a street than in later times. The rooms within were of a
good size but not very high; some of them were panelled to the ceiling
with an old-fashioned idea of comfort and warmth. The drawing-room
was one of these, a large oblong room to the front with a smaller one
divided from it by folding-doors, which looked out upon the garden. It
possessed, as its great distinction, a pretty marble mantelpiece, which
some one of a previous generation had brought from Italy. It is sad to
be obliged to confess that the panelling here had been painted, a warm
white, like the colour of a French salon, with old and dim pictures of
no particular merit let in here and there,--pictures which would have
been more in keeping with the oak of the original than with the present
colour of the walls. The house had been built by a Warrender, in the end
of the seventeenth century, and though it had been occupied by strangers
often, and let to all sorts of people, a considerable amount of the
furniture, and all the decorations, still belonged to that period. The
time had not come for the due appreciation of these relics of ancestral
taste. Chatty thought them all old-fashioned, and would gladly have
replaced them by fresh chairs and tables from the upholsterers: but
this was an expense not to be thought of, and, perhaps, even to eyes
untrained in any rules of art, there was something harmonious in the
combination. Something harmonious, too, with Chatty's feelings was in
the air of old tranquillity and long established use and wont. The
stillness of the house was as the stillness of ages. Human creatures
had come and gone, as the days went and came, sunshine coming in at one
moment, darkness falling the next, nothing altering the calm routine,
the established order. Pains and fevers and heartbreaks, and death
itself, would disappear and leave no sign, and all remain the same
in the quaint rose-scented room. The quiet overawed Chatty, and yet
was congenial. She felt herself to have come "home" to it, with all
illusions over. It was not just an ordinary coming back after a
holiday,--it was a return, a settling down for life.

It would be difficult to explain how it was that this conviction had
taken hold of her so strongly. It was but a month since she had left the
Warren with her mother, with some gentle anticipations of pleasure, but
none that were exaggerated or excessive. All that was likely to happen,
as far as she knew, was