"The furnishing I must leave until Mrs. Gaunt returns," said Gaunt, in a depressed way. "I can see that this stuff is all wrong, but I can't see what she would put in its place." "Oh, as to that, sir. If it's a question of what Mrs. Gaunt would like--why, I can tell you that myself, and you won't have far to seek, for we've got it all in the house at this moment," was Mrs. Wells's surprising answer. "Got it in the house?" "In the lumber-room, sir. Your great-aunts, the Miss Gaunts, turned all the old things into the lumber-room, after their father died, about fifty years ago, and refurnished great part of the house, so I'm told. There's a great many things up there, and Mrs. Gaunt, when she saw them, she went into raptures over them. Said they was as old as Adam, which I could hardly believe----"She broke off abruptly, for Gaunt, her morose master, had laughed aloud, and the circumstance was startling. "Adam's period," he hastened to apologise. "Yes, go on, please. If you showed the lumber-room to Mrs. Gaunt, why have you never mentioned it to me?" The good woman's eyes grew very round. "Why, sir, you was here when I came," said she. "I concluded you knew all about it. My part was only to see as the things didn't perish, for I have a kind of liking myself for all them antiquities." Gaunt's eyes were still dancing over the Adam joke; and his wandering gaze had strayed to the mantel, and realised that this was of the same period. Doubtless what made these walnut carved whatnots and arm-chairs look so wrong was their silent clash with the fine simplicity of the dental moulding. As his eye wandered over the faded pink wallpaper, with its brown, green and blue roses, he suddenly perceived, like a man whose eyes are newly opened, that the room was moulded for panels. It struck him that this was the treatment required. "So Mrs. Gaunt liked the things?" "Indeed, yes, sir. She said how she would like to use them. I can show you the exact pieces she picked out, sir." "Come along," said Gaunt impetuously. Here was a glorious idea. Here was something to fill in blank days of waiting! Virgie should find her own room at least habitable; incomplete, of course, and waiting for her touch, but not impossible as at present. It would welcome her, when she came back--_when she came back!_ Would she come? CHAPTER XX A CASE FOR INTERPOSITION? "_Why, here you have the awfulest of crimes For nothing! Hell broke loose on a butterfly! Yet here is the monster! Why, he's a mere man-- Born, bred and brought up in the usual way._" --R. Browning. It was six o'clock in the evening. Virginia stepped from the door of the Nursing Home out into Queen Anne Street with a radiant face.