Fires had been lighted in rooms where mould and mildew had long prevailed; wainscots had been scrubbed and polished till the whole house reeked of bees-wax and turpentine, to a degree that almost overpowered those pervading odours of damp and dry rot, which can curiously exist together. The old furniture had been made as bright as faded fabrics and worm-eaten wood could be made by labour; and the leaping light of blazing logs, reflected on the black oak panelling, gave a transient air of cheerfulness to the spacious dining-parlour where Sir John and his daughter took their first meal in the old home. And if to Angela’s eye, accustomed to the Italian loftiness of the noble mansions on the Thames, the broad oak crossbeams seemed coming down upon her head, there was at least an air of homely snugness in the low darkly coloured room. On that first evening there had been much to interest and engage her. She had the old house to explore, and dim childish memories to recall. Here was the room where her mother died, the room in which she herself had first seen the light—perhaps not until a month or so after her birth, since the seventeenth-century baby was not flung open-eyed into her birthday sunshine, but was swaddled and muffled in a dismal apprenticeship to life. The chamber had been hung with “blacks” for a twelvemonth, Reuben told her, as he escorted her over the house, and unlocked the doors of disused rooms. The tall bedstead with its red and yellow stamped velvet curtains and carved ebony posts looked like an Indian temple. One might expect to see Buddha squatting on the embroidered counterpane—the work of half a lifetime. When the curtains were drawn back, a huge moth flew out of the darkness, and spun and wheeled round the room with an awful humming noise, and to the superstitious mind might have suggested a human soul embodied in this phantasmal greyness, with power of sound in such excess of its bulk. “Sir John never used the room after her ladyship’s death,” Reuben explained, “though ’tis the best bed-chamber. He has always slept in the blue room, which is at the furthest end of the gallery from the room that has been prepared for madam. We call that the garden room, and it is mighty pretty in summer.” In summer! How far it seemed to summer-time in Angela’s thoughts! What a long gulf of nothingness to be bridged over, what a dull level plain to cross, before June and the roses could come round again, bringing with them the memory of last summer; and the days she had lived under the same roof with Fareham, and the evenings when they had sat in the same room, or loitered on the terrace, pausing now and then beside an Italian vase of gaudy flowers to look at this or that, or to watch the mob on the river; and those rare golden days, like that at Sayes Court, which she had spent in some excursion with Fareham and Henriette. “I hope madam likes the chamber we have prepared for her?” the old man said, as she stood dreaming.