‘Early Tudor--as to the oldest part. It was built by a relation of Bishop Fisher’s; then largely rebuilt under James I. Elizabeth stayed there twice. There is a trace of a visit of Sidney’s. Waller was there, and left a copy of verses in the library. Evelyn laid out a great deal of the garden. Lord Clarendon wrote part of his History in the garden, et cetera, et cetera. The place is steeped in associations, and as beautiful as a dream to begin with.’ ‘And the owner of all this is the author of the “Idols of the Market Place”?’ Robert nodded. ‘Did you ever meet him at Oxford? I believe he was there once or twice during my time, but I never saw him.’ ‘Yes,’ said Langham, thinking. ‘I met him at dinner at the Vice-Chancellor’s, now I remember. A bizarre and formidable person--very difficult to talk to,’ he added reflectively. Then as he looked up he caught a sarcastic twitch of Rose Leyburn’s lip and understood it in a moment. Incontinently he forgot the Squire and fell to asking himself what had possessed him on that luckless journey down. He had never seemed to himself more perverse, more unmanageable; and for once his philosophy did not enable him to swallow the certainty that this slim flashing creature must have thought him a morbid idiot with as much _sang-froid_ as usual. Robert interrupted his reflections by some Oxford question, and presently Catherine carried off Rose to her room. On their way they passed a door, beside which Catherine paused hesitating, and then with a bright flush on the face, which had such maternal calm in it already, she threw her arm round Rose and drew her in. It was a white empty room, smelling of the roses outside, and waiting in the evening stillness for the life that was to be. Rose looked at it all--at the piles of tiny garments, the cradle, the pictures from Retsch’s ‘Song of the Bell,’ which had been the companions of their own childhood, on the walls--and something stirred in the girl’s breast. ‘Catherine, I believe you have everything you want, or you soon will have!’ she cried, almost with a kind of bitterness, laying her hands on her sister’s shoulders. ‘Everything but worthiness!’ said Catherine softly, a mist rising in her calm gray eyes. ‘And you, ‘Röschen,’ she added wistfully--‘have you been getting a little more what you want?’ ‘What’s the good of asking?’ said the girl, with a little shrug of impatience. ‘As if creatures like we ever got what they want! London has been good fun certainly--if one could get enough, of it. Catherine, how long is that marvelous person going to stay?’ and she pointed in the direction of Langham’s room. ‘A week,’ said Catherine, smiling at the girl’s disdainful tone. ‘I was afraid you didn’t take to him.’