be higher and the roof lower. John, on the other
hand, delighted in his roof, and also in his stables, the other
remarkable feature of the place.

As the visitors advanced, children's voices greeted them; the little
ones were running in and out; they presently met and seized Mrs. Walker,
dancing round her, and leading her in triumph into the hall. Then
Justina observed a good-sized doll, comfortably put to bed on one of the
hall chairs, and tightly tucked up in some manifest pinafores; near it
stood a child's wheel-barrow, half full of picture-books. "I shall not
allow that sort of litter here when I come, as I hope and trust I soon
shall do," thought Justina. "Children's toys are all very well in their
proper places."

Then Justina, who had never been inside the house before, easily induced
the children to take her from room to room, of those four which were
thoroughfares to one another. Her attentive eyes left nothing unnoticed,
the fine modern water-colour landscapes on the walls of one, the
delicate inlaid cabinets in another. Then a library, with a capital
billiard-table, and lastly John's den. There was something about all
these rooms which seemed to show the absence of a woman. They were not
untidy, but in the drawing-room was John's great microscope, with the
green-shaded apparatus for lighting it; the books also from the library
had been allowed to overflow into it, and encroach upon all the tables.
The dining-room alone was as other people's dining-rooms, but John's
own den was so very far gone in originality and strangeness of litter,
that Justina felt decidedly uneasy when she saw it; it made manifest to
her that her hoped-for spouse was not the manner of man whom she could
expect to understand; books also here had accumulated, and stood in rows
on chairs and tables and shelves; pipes were lying on the stone
chimneypiece, sharing it with certain old and new, beautiful and ugly
bronzes; long papers of genealogies and calculations in John's
handwriting were pinned against the walls; various broken bits of
Etruscan pottery stood on brackets here and there. It seemed to be the
owner's habit to pin his lucubrations about the place, for here was a
vocabulary of strange old Italian words, with their derivations, there a
list of peculiarities and supposed discoveries in an old Norse dialect.

Emily in the meantime had noticed the absence of the twins; it was not
till lunch was announced, and she went back into the