The two girls walked towards the house together, their elders following more slowly. “Isn’t Rhoda Meres a nice girl?” said Isabel, when the object of her remark was out of hearing. “Very,” her cousin assented, though without enthusiasm. He seemed to be thinking of something else. “The poor child has got a foolish idea into her head; she wants to go on to the stage.” “Does she--ha? Most young people have that idea at one time or another, I believe. In default of a special audience of one, you see----” “And she _is_ such a good, dear girl!” pursued Isabel, when Asquith showed no sign of continuing. “Her father is a literary man, the editor of a magazine called _Ropers Miscellany_--do you know it? He and I are the best of old friends. Its only with the thought of helping her father, I’m sure, that Rhoda has taken up this fancy; we must drive it out of her head somehow.” “Yes, I suppose so,” remarked Robert, more absently than before. Isabel glanced at him, and kept silence till they reached the house. There was nothing remarkable about the structure itself of Knightswell; the front was long and low, built of brick faced with stone, and the level entrance was anything but imposing. The main portion of the building was early eighteenth century, but in the rear there still existed a remnant of the sixteenth century manor-house which had once stood here; the ancient hall now served as kitchen, its fine stone fireplace being filled up with an incongruous modern range. The present hall was surrounded with oak panelling, which Mr. Clarendon had obtained at the dismantling of an old house in the neighbourhood; all else of the interior had become, by successive changes, completely modernised, with the exception of an elaborate chimney-piece in the drawing-room--massive marble-work resting on caryatides--always said, though without corroborative evidence, to be a production of Grinling Gibbons. The faces of the two supporters were curiously unlike each other: on the one side it was that of a youthful maiden, who smiled, and seemed to be upraising her arms in sport; the other was an aged but not unbeautiful face, wearing an expression of long-suffering sadness, worn under the burden which the striving arms sustained. In the dining-room were a few good pictures, taken with the house from the preceding occupants. For Knightswell was not the ancestral abode of Mr. Clarendon’s family; it had passed, by frequent changes, from tenant to tenant, all inglorious. Notwithstanding his historic name, Mr. Clarendon was a _novus homo_; his father had begun life as an obscure stockbroker, had made a great fortune, and ended his life in a comfortable dwelling in Bayswater; his daughters, there were two, married reputably, and were no more heard of.