Happily, the wrecker was content to let well enough alone after enlarging the house, laying turf, and planting shrubs and flowers. He found _The Hollies_ a ramshackle place, and left it even more so, but with a new note of artistry and several unexpectedly charming vistas. Thus, the big double window opened straight into an irregular garden which merged insensibly into a sloping lawn bounded by a river-pool. The bank on the other side of the stream rose sharply and was well wooded. Above the crest showed the thatched roofs or red tiles of Steynholme, which was a village in the time of William the Conqueror, and has remained a village ever since. Frame this picture in flowering shrubs, evergreens, a few choice firs, a copper beech, and some sturdy oaks shadowing the lawn, and the prospect on a June morning might well have led out into the open any young man with a pipe. But John Menzies Grant seemed to have no eye for a scene that would have delighted a painter. He turned to the light, scrutinized so closely a strip of turf which ran close to the wall that he might have been searching for a lost diamond, and then peered through the lowermost left-hand pane of the small window into the room he had just quitted. The result of this peeping was remarkable in more ways than one. A stout, elderly, red-faced woman, who had entered the room soon after she heard Grant’s chair being moved, caught sight of the intent face. She screamed loudly, and dropped a cup and saucer with a clatter on to a Japanese tray. Grant hurried back to the French window. In his haste he did not notice a long shoot of a Dorothy Perkins rose which trailed across his path, and it struck him smartly on the cheek. “I’m afraid I startled you, Mrs. Bates,” he said, smiling so pleasantly that no woman or child could fail to put trust in him. “You did that, sir,” agreed Mrs. Bates, collapsing into the chair Grant had just vacated. Like most red-faced people, Mrs. Bates turned a bluish purple when alarmed, and her aspect was so distressing now that Grant’s smile was banished by a look of real concern. “I’m very sorry,” he said contritely. “I had no notion you were in the room. Shall I call Minnie?” Minnie, it may be explained, was Mrs. Bates’s daughter and assistant, the two, plus a whiskered Bates, gardener and groom, forming the domestic establishment presided over by Grant. “Nun-no, sir,” stuttered the housekeeper. “It’s stupid of me. But I’m not so young as I was, an’ me heart jumps at little things.” Grant saw that she was recovering, though slowly. He thought it best not to make too much of the incident; but asked solicitously if he might give her some brandy.