ile, advertised for a furnished house, and found one--by
letter, which seemed to be the very thing he wanted. "Handsomely and
conveniently furnished five miles from a railway station--a well-built
house standing in its own grounds of five acres--garden, orchard
pasture, magnificent view." Being as unversed in the ways of house
agents as in those of women, he took it on trust, paid a quarter's rent,
and went down to take possession. He had instructed the local house
agent to find a woman who would come in for a few hours daily to "do for
him."

"I'll have no silly women living in the house," said he.

It was on an inclement June evening that the station fly set him down in
front of his new house. The drive had been long and dreary, and seemed
to Maurice more like seventy miles than seven. Now he let down the
carriage window and thrust his head into the rain to see his new house.
It was a stucco villa, with iron railings in the worst possible taste.
It had an air at once new and worn out; no one seemed ever to have lived
in it, and yet everything about it was broken and shabby. The door stuck
a little at first with the damp, and when at last it opened and Maurice
went over his house, he found it furnished mainly with oil-cloth and
three-legged tables, and photographs in Oxford frames--like a seaside
lodging-house. The house was clean, however, and the woman in
attendance was clean, but the atmosphere of the place was that of a
vault. He looked out through the streaming panes at the magnificent view
so dwelt upon in the house agents' letters. The house stood almost at
the edge of a disused chalk quarry; far below stretched a flat plain,
dotted here and there with limekilns and smoky, tall chimneys. The five
acres looked very bare and thistly, and the rain was dripping heavily
from a shivering, half-dead cypress on to a draggled, long-haired grass
plot. Mr Brent shivered too, and ordered a fire.

When the woman had gone, he sat long by the fire in one of those cane
and wood chairs that fold up--who wants a chair to fold up?--so common
in lodging-houses. Unless you sit quite straight in these chairs you
tumble out of them. He gazed at the fire, and thought, and dreamed. His
dreams were, naturally, of Camilla; his thoughts were of his work.

"I've taken the house for three years," said he. "Well, one place is as
good as another to be wretched in. But one room I must furnish--for you
can't work on oil-cloth."

So next day