They had no further conversation on the subject for the present, since during the next couple of hours Mrs. Brereton successfully settled a hundred details and arrangements that would have taken a less quick woman half a day to grapple with. The house stood some quarter of a mile from the river-bank, on the reach between Maidenhead and Bray, red-bricked and creeper-covered, but picturesque in a haphazard, bungalow manner, intolerably dank in the winter, when languid, foggy water covered the lower lawn, but ideally adapted for summer Sunday parties. It had long been left to moulder and mildew, but some ten years ago, while the Thames was still only a geographical expression, Mrs. Brereton, in a hunt for some place of the kind near London, but sufficiently remote not to be overrun, had lighted on it, and with her quick eye had seen how admirably it would suit her wants. Inside there were not more than a dozen bedrooms and two or three adequate reception-rooms; but the garden was exquisite, and had now under her guiding hand fulfilled rare possibilities. A steep slope of grass, negotiable by three flights of stone steps, led from the gravel path, which bordered the house, on to the lawn, which lay in terraces towards the river, framed with intersections of box hedges, cut into pyramidal and geometric shapes, and bordered by vivid beds of flowers. The entrance of each of these lawns was in line with the centre of the house, and they communicated one with another by broad steps of grass. One was levelled for croquet, another was a rose-garden with a pergola running round it, while that nearest the house was during the summer chiefly occupied by garden and basket chairs. The whole front of the house, again, was, with its gravel path, capable of being roofed in with an awning, carpeted with rugs, and furnished for eating, drinking, card-playing, and other diversions not less diverting. Behind the framing of box hedge which encircled the lawn lay on each side a shrubbery of blossoming trees, lilacs and laburnums, and behind, again, tall elms and beeches shaded the paths that led to the meadow of untamed land below the lawn, and bordered the river itself, where weeping-willows trailed their slow-moving, slender fingers over the tarred roof of the boat-house. Here, also, Mrs. Brereton had caused to be erected a private bathing-place, dug out at great expense in the river. It was remarkable only for the fact that it had never been used, except once by Mr. Brereton by mistake.