The conversation was turning in a circle, and Mara was repeating her answers, as was Patricia her questions. Some invisible barrier divided the two girls, and although Patricia wished, in order to earn her salary honestly, to break it down, Mara apparently did not. Neither in look nor gesture did she make any advance, so Miss Carrol could do nothing but sigh over the difficulty of the problem which she had to solve, and renew her walk towards the house. Mara followed in silence, not sullen at being questioned and not angry. She was simply indifferent. The Colpster homestead was two-storey and rambling, confusedly composed of various styles of architecture. The oldest portion was Tudor, and had been built by Amyas, the founder of the family, when he had first set up his tent in this solitary spot. Later Colpsters had added and taken away, so that one wing was wanting, while the other was of Jacobean style. On one side also there stood a square Georgian block of many rooms, comfortable but ugly. The effect of this mass of different orders of architecture was to make the entire dwelling look picturesque, if not strictly beautiful. Time also had mellowed the whole to lovely restful hues, and Nature had clothed many eye-sores with trailing ivy and Virginian creeper. Indeed, so thickly were the walls covered with living vegetation, that it looked as though the loosely-built, untidy dwelling was fastened to the emerald sward of the lawns. Or, as Patricia thought, halting on the doorstep for a single moment, as though the building had sprang therefrom in a single night, like a mushroom. And the house dwelt in, and fondled, and loved for many generations had about it a warm, homely feeling of intimate humanity. But over it, as the girl again observed with a shiver, ever hung the angry, red-faced cliff, menacing and sinister. The interior of the mansion was as jumbled, so to speak, as its outside, for various additions and alterations and removals had destroyed the original plan of the dwelling, if, indeed, it ever had possessed any such design. Some rooms had doors leading into others, passages twisted and turned in a most bewildering manner, and a few ended in blank walls. A stranger would find himself stepping down into one room and up into another, as the flooring of the whole house was irregular. There were narrow doors and broad doors: many of the windows were diamond-paned casements, while others presented a large surface of modern glass. Grates were here, and vast open fireplaces there, and many rooms were as dark as others were light. The house both pleased and irritated, as everywhere the visitor came upon unexpected corners, or was brought up short before closed entrances. It was a nightmare house, and like none that Patricia, used to extreme modernity, had ever entered.