The aunts and uncles had been old-fashioned non-locomotive people, hoarding up and garnering the furniture of past generations. Thus had the Rector acquired Chippendale chairs and tables, old Dutch tulip-wood cabinets and bureaus, Louis Quinze commodes, Elizabethan clocks, Derby and Worcester, Bow, Bristol, Leeds, and Swansea crockery, with a sprinkling of those dubious jugs and bowls that are generally fathered on Lowestoft. Past generations had amassed and hoarded in order that the Rector might be rich in art treasures without ever putting his hand in his pocket. Furniture that had cost a few pounds when it was bought was now worth hundreds, and the Rector had it all for nothing, just because he came of a selfish celibate race. The Chippendale furniture, the Dutch marqueterie work, old china, and old plate had all been in Miss Lawford’s mind when she took the Rector in hand and brought him to see her fitness for his wife. True that her home at South Hill was as elegant, and in all things as desirable; but there was a wide difference between living under the roof of her brother, more or less on sufferance, and being mistress of her own house. Thus the humbler charms of the Rectory impressed her more than the dignity of the Hill. Sir Vernon Lawford was not a pleasant man to whom to be beholden. His daughters were now grown up. Madoline was sovereign mistress of the house which must one day be her own; and Rhoda Lawford felt that to stay at the Hill would be to sink to the humdrum position of a maiden aunt, for whom nobody cared very much. Mrs. Ferrers was sitting in a Japanese chair on the lawn, in front of the drawing-room windows, nursing a black and white Japanese pug, and rather yearning for someone from the outer world, even in that earthy paradise where the guelder roses were all in bloom and the air was heavy with the odour of hawthorn-blossom. ‘At last!’ she exclaimed, as Daphne and her companion made their timorous advance across the velvet turf, mown twice a week in the growing season. ‘You too, Mr. Turchill; I thought you were never coming to see me.’ ‘After that delightful evening with the Mowbrays and the people from Liddington! It was too ungrateful of me,’ said Edgar. ‘If you call me Mr. Turchill I shall think I am never to be forgiven.’ ‘Well, then, it shall be Edgar, as it was in the old days,’ said Mrs. Ferrers, with a faint suspicion of sentiment. There had been a time when it had seemed to her not altogether impossible that she should become Mrs. Turchill. Hawksyard Grange was such a delicious old place; and Edgar was her junior by only fourteen years. ‘I don’t want you to make ceremonious calls just because you happen to have dined here; but I want you to drop in often because you like us. I want you to bring me breathings of the outside world. The life of a clergyman’s wife in a country parish is so narrow. I feel hourly becoming a vegetable.’