Here she invited him to sit down upon a chair, having first dusted it with her apron, and declaring that she would send Miss Fanny to him in "a minit," vanished, and left him to his meditations. "Most extraordinary place," said Charles, glancing round at the books in their cases. "Most extraordinary place I ever entered." As he looked about him, he heard the youthful servant's voice raised now to its highest pitch, and calling "Miss Fanny, Miss Fanny, Miss F-a-a-anny" and dying away as if in back passages. The library was evidently much inhabited by the Lamberts; it was pleasantly perfumed with tobacco, and in the grate lay the expiring embers of a morning fire. The Lamberts were evidently not of the order of people who extinguish their fires on the first of May. There were whips and fishing-rods, and a gun or two here and there, and books everywhere about, besides those on the shelves. The morning paper lay spread open on the floor, where it had been cast by the last reader, and on the floor lay other things, which in most houses are to be found on tables, envelopes crumpled up, letters, and other trifles. On a little table by the window grew an orange-tree in a flower-pot, bearing oranges as large as marrow-fat peas; through the half-open window came wasps in and out, the perfume of mignonette and the murmur of distant bees. He came to the window and looked out. Outside lay the ruins of a garden bathed in the golden light of summer, the light that "Speaks wide and loud From deeps blown clean of cloud, As though day's heart were proud And heaven's were glad." Beyond lay a paddock in whose centre lay the wraith of a tennis lawn; the net hung shrivelled between the tottering poles, and close to the net he saw the forlorn figure of a girl playing what seemed a fantastic game of tennis all alone. She would hit the ball into the air and strike it back when it fell; if it went over the net she would jump after it. Now appeared the slattern maid, card between finger and thumb, picking her way like a cat along the tangled garden path in the direction of the girl. Mr Bevan turned away from the window and looked at the books lining the wall, his eye travelling from Humboldt's works to the tooled back of Milton--he was trying to recollect who Schopenhauer was--when of a sudden the door opened and an amazingly pretty girl of the old-fashioned school of beauty entered the room. She was dark, and she came into the room laughing, yet with a half-frightened air as if fearful of being caught missing from some old canvas. "You won't tell," said she as they shook hands like intimate acquaintances. "If father knew I had asked Mr Hancock, you know what, he'd kill me; I really believe he would." She put down her tennis racquet on the table, her hat she had left outside, and evidently in a hurry, to judge by the delightful disorder of her hair.