Sir Henry Millard’s modest country residence was nothing more than a fair-sized one-storied white cottage, close to the road, from which it was separated only by a little garden just big enough to contain a semicircular drive, a small half-moon lawn, and two side-beds full of roses. A stone-paved verandah ran the whole length of the house, and a hammock swung between two of the supports of the green roof, in what would have been glaring publicity if there had ever been any public to speak of on the quiet road in front. It would have been rather a pretty little place if Sir Henry, to meet the requirements of his family, had not preferred enlarging it by adding at the back various hideous red brick wings and outbuildings of his own designing, to the more reasonable course of taking a larger house. The pleasure of conceiving and superintending these original “improvements” had indeed, while it lasted, been the most unalloyed joy of Sir Henry’s simple life; to worry the architect, who had had to be called in at the last to put a restraining check on Sir Henry’s inspirations, which threatened to dispense with the vulgar adjuncts of passages and staircases; to test the building materials, samples of which lay about the sitting-rooms for days; above all, to do a little amateur bricklaying during the workmen’s dinner hour--were joys the mere memory of which thrilled him more than any recollection of his honeymoon. Whatever the architectural defects of the house might be, Nouna had nothing but admiration for it. The tiny little hall; the box-like drawing-room to the right, with high glass cupboards on each side of the fireplace containing apostle spoons, old china bowls, fragments of quartz and the like; the bare-looking dining-room to the left, furnished as plainly as a school-room, and even the bake-house which led out from it, all enchanted her by their novelty; while the bedroom up stairs, ten feet square, into which she was shown, put the climax to this deliciously new experience, and made her feel, as she expressed herself to her husband, “that she wished she had married a farmer.”