"Oh, my goodness!" said Essie, sparkling. "Do just go on, dear!" "Yes, well, this would be yours. We wouldn't call it the drawing-room or any rot like that. Just your room with jolly furniture and a little bureau where you'd keep your accounts. We'd have tea in here when we didn't have it outside. The servants would call it the sitting-room. We'd call it jolly little Essie's room. I'd get fed up with working sometimes, you know, and come and sprawl about in here. You'd be sewing or something, I expect." Essie had no expression for all this but an enormous sigh of ecstasy. Then she said: "Now we'll go back to yours," and hand in hand they came to it--and to their reckoning. III "Simply built for a chap to write in," Mr. Wriford said. "Just look how it gets the sun. It's stopped raining. I'd come here directly after breakfast. That's the time I can write. There's where I'd have my table. You'd see I was kept quiet." "Oh, wouldn't I just," said Essie. "You see, there's a passage comes right down to this door, and my goodness if I saw any of the servants come past that corner there, or even go into the room overhead! My goodness, they'd know it if they did!" He put his arm about her shoulders and laughed and pressed her to him; and Essie said: "Oh, just fancy if it really could be ours!" He kept her there. She in his arm, they in surroundings such as these: he working, she ministering to him--ah, return to life! return to life! "Well, we'll have a place as like it as we can find," he said. She shook her head. With just a little sigh, "We never could," she said. "We'll be happier than anything wherever we are; but one thing, there couldn't be another darling place like this, and another, it would cost a fair fortune. Why, it's not even to let. It's only for sale." He told her easily: "That's all right. That's just what we're going to do--buy a little place somewhere. I bet a thousand would buy this Whitehouse, buried away down here." Essie made a tremendous mouthful of the word: "Well, a _thousand_!" He laughed and squeezed her in reproof again. "Or two," he said. "Won't you ever understand what they pay for what you call the silly books?" She had protested before, when in these Whitecliffe days he had assured her of his identity with Philip Wriford, that she never would have said silly in the library that evening if she had known the book was his "really." She protested now again with a wriggle and a laugh; but quickly upon her protest looked up at him with: "Oh, you can't ever mean that you really could buy this? You simply can't?" He nodded, smiling. "Oh," she cried, "why not then? Why not? Oh, Arthur, just think if you would! Oh, jus' think!"