The bedroom at one end was dedicated to the hope of Michael Fane's occupation and was always referred to in letters as his: "_By the way I put the largest dish-cover in your bedroom._" The next two bedrooms were also empty and belonged in spirit to the friends with whom Guy had lived during his last year at Oxford. The fourth was his own, very simply and sparsely furnished in comparison with the bedroom up in the roof which was intended for Miss Peasey. The preparation of that for an elderly unmarried woman had involved a certain voluptuousness of rep and fumed oak and heavily decorated china, the fruit of the second-best bedroom in the house of the dish-covers. As Guy went up the crooked stairs and knocked his head on three successive beams, he hoped Miss Peasey would not be as disproportionately large as the kitchen dresser. Her handwriting had been spidery enough, and he pictured her hopefully as small and wizened. Miss Peasey's bower with the big dormer window surveying the tree-tops of the orchard was certainly a success, and Guy saw that Michael had with happy intuition of female aspiration hung on the wall opposite her bed a large steel-engraving of Doré's Martyrs, which had been included with two hammocks and a fishing-rod in one of the odd lots lightly bid for at the auction. There did not seem anything else she could want; so, having killed a bluebottle with a tartan pincushion, he came down-stairs. Guy had left his own room to the last, partly because he regretted so much the delay in the arrival of those books and partly because, however inadequately equipped was the rest of the house, this room was always the final justification of his tenancy. It was a larger room than any of the others, for the corridor did not cut off its share of the back. It possessed, in addition to the usual window looking out over the western side of the valley, a very large bay which hung right over the stream, with a view of the orchard, of the church steeple, of the water-meadows beyond, and of the wold rolling across the horizon. This morning Michael and he had pushed the furniture into place, had set in order the great wicker chairs and nailed against the wall the frames of green canvas. The floor was covered with a sweet-smelling mat of Abingdon rushes; and the curtains of his old rooms in Balliol were hung in place, dim green curtains sown with golden fleurs-de-lys. The ivory image of an emaciated saint standing on the mantelshelf between candlesticks of old wrought iron was probably a Spanish Virgin, but Guy preferred to say she was Saint Rose of Lima because "_O Rose of Lima_" seemed a wonderful apostrophe to begin a poem. Nothing indeed remained for the room's perfection but to fill the new bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. Why had he not hired a cart in Shipcot? They would have been here by now, and he would actually have been able to begin work to-night, setting thus a noble period to these last six weeks of preparation.