After the two girls had taken off their hats in the state bed-chamber next the drawing-room—a room whose walls were panelled with needlework executed by an ancestress of Edgar’s in the reign of Charles the First—they all went off to explore the house; ascending a steep secret stair which they entered from a door in the panelling of the dining-room; exploring long slippery corridors and queer little rooms that opened mysteriously out of other rooms; and triangular dressing-closets squeezed into a corner between a chimney and an outer-wall; laughing at the old furniture: the tall toppling four-post bed-steads; the sage-green tapestry; the capacious old grates, or still older brazen dogs; the inimitable Dutch tiles. ‘It must be heavenly to live in such a funny old house,’ cried Daphne, as they came cautiously down the black oak staircase, slippery as glass, pausing to admire a ramshackle collection of Indian curios and Japanese pottery on the broad window-ledge half-way down. ‘If you would only try it,’ murmured Edgar close in her ear, and looking ineffably sheepish as he spoke. Again the all-significant words fell unheeded. She skipped lightly down the remaining stairs, protesting she could get accustomed to them in no time. ‘“So light a foot will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint,”’ said Gerald. ‘Didn’t I tell you so? You can’t live without quoting him,’ cried Daphne triumphantly. The dinner went off merrily. It was a capital dinner in a good old English style, ponderous but excellent. There were none of those refinements which distinguished the board over which Mrs. Ferrers presided. The attempts at elegance smacked of a banished era. A turbot decorated with sliced lemon and barberries; a befrilled haunch, exhibiting its noble proportions in a heavy silver dish; a superabundance of creams and jellies and trifles and syllabubs; an elaborate dessert lying in state on the sideboard, to be slowly and laboriously transferred to the polished oak after the cloth was drawn; and the coachman to help wait at table. The whole thing was rustic and old-fashioned, and Edgar was afraid Daphne was secretly turning it all into ridicule. Yet she seemed happy, and she said so much in praise of Hawksyard and of the perfect order in which the house was kept, that Mrs. Turchill’s heart began to soften towards her. ‘You seem fond of the country, and of countrified ways, Miss Daphne,’ said the matron relentingly. ‘Yet I should have thought a young lady like you would have been pining for London, and balls and theatres.’ ‘I never was at a dance in my life,’ answered Daphne, ‘and only once at a theatre, and that was the great opera-house in Paris. I don’t think I should ever care to go to a meaner theatre. My thoughts went up so high that night, I shouldn’t like to let them down again by seeing trumpery.’