Once more Berwick looked round the hall, and then, abruptly, went out again into the open air, and so made his way across at right angles to a glass door giving direct access to a small room hung with sporting prints and caricatures, unaltered since the time it had been the estate room of Madame Sampiero's father. Here, at least, Berwick felt with satisfaction, everything was absolutely as usual. He went through into a narrow passage, up a short steep staircase to the upper floor, and so to the old-fashioned bedroom and dressing-room which no one but he ever occupied, and which were both still filled with his schoolboy and undergraduate treasures. There was a third room on each of the floors composing the two-storied building which had been added to the Priory some fifty years before, and these extra rooms--two downstairs, one upstairs--were sacred to Mrs. Turke. There, as Berwick well knew, she cherished the mahogany cradle in which she had so often rocked him to sleep: there were photographs of himself at every age, to which, of late years political caricatures had been added, and there also were garnered the endless gifts he had made and was always making to his old nurse. James Berwick had been sadly spoilt by the good things life had heaped on him in almost oppressive lavishness, but no thought of personal convenience would have made him give up, when at the Priory, these two rooms--this proximity to the elderly woman to whom he was so dear, and who had tended him so devotedly through a delicate and fretful childhood. As he walked about his bedroom, he looked round him well pleased. A good fire was burning in the grate, still compassed about with a nursery fender, and his evening clothes, an old suit always kept by him at Chancton, were already laid out on the four-post bed. Everything was exactly as he would have wished to find it; and so seeing, he suddenly frowned, most unreasonably. Why was it, he asked himself, that only here, only at the Priory, were things done for him as he would have always wished them to be--that is, noiselessly, invisibly? His own servants over at Chillingworth never made him so comfortable! But then, as he was fond of reminding himself, he was one of those men who dislike to be dependent on others. A nice regard, perhaps, for his own dignity had always caused him to dispense with the services of the one dependant to whom, we are told, his master can never hope to be a hero. There came a knock, a loud quavering tap-tap on the door. Berwick walked forward and opened it himself, then put his arms round Mrs. Turke's fat neck, and kissed her on each red cheek. The mauve and white striped gown was new to him, but each piece of handsome jewellery set about the substantial form had been his gift. "Well, Turke! well, old Turkey! it's an age since I've seen you all! I was in the village for a moment yesterday----" "For a moment? Fie, Mr. James, I know all about it, sir! You was at the Cottage for hours!"