Mrs. Boringdon, sitting in the drawing-room at Chancton Cottage, looked, in spite of her handsome dress and her manner and appearance of refinement, strangely unsuited to the place in which she found herself. Even the Indian tea-table--one of the few pieces of furniture added to the room by its present occupant, and now laden with substantial silver tea-pot, cream-jug, and sugar-basin burnished to their highest point of brilliancy--was out of keeping with its fragile charm. The room, indeed, had been scarcely altered since it had been furnished, some sixty years before, as a maiden retreat for one of Madame Sampiero's aunts, the Miss Lavinia Rebell of whom tradition still lingered in the village, and whose lover had been killed in the Peninsular War. On her arrival at Chancton Mrs. Boringdon would have dearly liked to consign the shabby old furniture, the faded water-colours and colour prints, to some unhonoured lumber-room of the Priory, but even had such desecration been otherwise possible, the new mistress of Chancton Cottage was only too well aware that she lacked the means to make the old-fashioned house what she would have considered habitable. Indeed, she had been thankful to learn that the estate agency offered to her son through the intermediary of his friend, James Berwick, carried with it the use of a fully furnished house of any sort. Whenever Mrs. Boringdon felt more than usually dissatisfied and critical of the furnishings of the rooms where she was fated to spend so much of her time--for she had no love of the open air--she tried to remind herself that this phase of her life was only temporary; that soon--her son thought in two or three years, but Berwick laughed at so prudent a forecast--the present Government would go out, and then "something" must surely be found for her clever Oliver. To-day, her son had brought his friend back to lunch, and the two young men had stayed on in the dining-room and in the little smoking-room beyond, talking eagerly the one with the other. As the mother sat in her drawing-room patiently longing for her cup of tea, but content to wait Oliver's good pleasure--or rather that of James Berwick--she could hear the voices rising and falling, and she rejoiced to think of the intimacy which those sounds betokened.