Mount Royal was delightful at this season. Liberal fires in all the rooms filled the old oak panelled house with a glow of colour, and a sense of ever-present warmth that was very comfortable after the sharpness of October breezes. Those greenhouses and hot-house, which had been for so many years Mrs. Tregonell's perpetual care, now disgorged their choicest contents. Fragile white and yellow asters, fairy-like ferns, Dijon roses, lilies of the valley, stephanotis, mignonette, and Cape jasmine filled the rooms with perfume. Modern blinds of diapered crimson and grey subdued the light of those heavily mullioned windows which had been originally designed with a view to strength and architectural effect, rather than to the admission of the greatest possible amount of daylight. The house at this season of the year seemed made for warmth, so thick the walls, so heavily curtained the windows; just as in the height of summer it seemed made for coolness. Christabel had respected all her aunt's ideas and prejudices: nothing had been changed since Mrs. Tregonell's death--save for that one sad fact that she was gone. The noble matronly figure, the handsome face, the kindly smile were missing from the house where the widow had so long reigned, an imperious but a beneficent mistress--having her own way in all things, but always considerate of other people's happiness and comfort. Mr. Tregonell was inclined to be angry with his wife sometimes for her religious adherence to her aunt's principles and opinions in things great and small. "You are given over body and soul to my poor mother's fads," he said. "If it had not been for you I should have turned the house out of windows when she was gone--got rid of all the worm-eaten furniture, broken out new windows, and let in more light. One feels half asleep in a house where there is nothing but shadow and the scent of hot-house flowers. I should have given _carte blanche_ to some London man--the fellow who writes verses, and who invented the storks and sunflower style of decoration--and have let him refurnish the saloon and music-room, pitch out a library which nobody reads, and substitute half a dozen dwarf book-cases in gold and ebony, filled with brightly bound books, and with Japanese jars and bottles on the top of them to give life and colour to the oak panelling. I hate a gloomy house." "Oh, Leonard, you surely would not call Mount Royal gloomy!" "But I do: I hate a house that smells of one's ancestors." "Just now you objected to the scent of the flowers." "You are always catching me up--there was never such a woman to argue--but I mean what I say. The smell is a combination of stephanotis and old bones. I wish you would let me build you a villa at Torquay or Dartmouth. I think I should prefer Dartmouth: it's a better place for yachting." "You are very kind, but I would rather live at Mount Royal than anywhere else. Remember I was brought up here."