But Nutfield was a house of a different description. It was an old grey manor house, limited in extent, though its space was yet too great for either the needs or the means of its well-descended owners. They were glad to turn its vacant rooms to profit, by converting them into country lodgings, without abating a jot of their claims to gentility. Nutfield had never been a place of the same extent as Trevor Court and St. Bevis’s, and it had shared to some degree the fate of its proprietors in being reduced very nearly to the rough, uncared-for plight of a farmhouse. But the solidity of the walls and a certain tenacity as well as stoutness in the human constitution, had served Nutfield and the Kingscotes alike in good stead. Nutfield was marked by a quaint massiveness in its original mullioned windows, which caused the light to dwindle to darkness visible within doors, and in its heavy cross-beams that looked as if they were about to fall and crush the occupants. Mullions and cross-beams were not altogether without their pleasantness, and suited the primitive situation of the house in the middle of an orchard, where the mossy arms of the old fruit-trees stretched so close to the house, that they farther darkened it, and flung their shifting shadows on the floors. Within doors, the old ebony-black furniture, frayed drugget and matting, with some remnants of faded woollen tapestry, and a smoked black picture or two framed in the panels, promised at least peaceful stability, friendly familiarity, and simple ease and comfort. The aspect of the place contrasted on the whole favourably with the ghastly bareness of St. Bevis’s, and the painful pretence at home, which was no home, of Trevor Court. Miss Kingscote had not the charm which, but for its being the Kingscotes’ ancestral house, she herself could never have found in Nutfield. Miss Kingscote was a round dumpy woman, with a large flat face, like a flat surface of any kind catching gleams and reflections from surrounding objects, but incapable of individual lights and shadows. Her sprigged linen gown and round cap of her own knitting, made her figure look still more unshapely, and her face more like a shallow saucer. She was awkward to uncouthness, as she nodded to refined Lady Bell. It was clear before Miss Kingscote opened her mouth, that the woman whom the loyalty or the caprice of the county gentry chose to retain, nay, to reinstate in their ranks, was simply hopeless in the extreme rusticity which had been her early heritage from neglect and dishonesty.