"It's too late to change it before Dorothy comes," she decided, mournfully. "But I do hope that there will be no more taking of Mr. Tufton's advice. I'm sure that curved seat he persuaded me to put at the end was a mistake. People deposit seats in gardens without thinking. Nobody will ever sit there. It simply means that one will always have to walk round it. So unnecessary! I do hope that Dorothy will give orders to remove it." "Connie," Arabella exclaimed, with a joyful gurgle, "don't you love the way mother practises the idea of Dorothy? She used to be just the same when we were expecting a new governess." Her sister, who was munching an apple, nodded her agreement without speaking. The dowager was about to propose a descent by the terraces to visit her water-lily pool (which would have involved a tiresome climb up again for nothing, because the rose-hearted water-lilies of summer were nothing now but blobs of decayed vegetation) when the wheels of the chaise crackled on the drive and the girls insisted that if she were going to have enough time for an expedition before lunch she must start at once. Clare Court viewed from the southeast appeared as a long, low house of gray stone with no particular indication of its age for the unprofessional observer, to whom, indeed, the chief feature might have seemed the four magnolias that covered it with their large glossy leaves, the rufous undersides of which, mingling with the stone, gave it a warmth of color that otherwise it would have lacked. The house was built on a moderate elevation, the levels of which were spacious enough to allow for ornamental gardens on the south side of the drive; these had been laid out in the Anglo-Italian manner with pergolas and statuary, yews instead of cypresses, and box-bordered terraces leading gradually down to the ornamental pool overhung on the far side by weeping willows. The kitchens and servants' quarters on either side of the house were masked by shrubberies and groves of tall pines, in the ulterior gloom of which the drive disappeared on the way to the stables and the home farm. The dowager got into the chaise, and the pony, a dapple gray of some antiquity, proceeded at a pace that did not make it difficult for the two girls, who by now had summoned to heel half a dozen dogs of various breeds, to keep up with it on foot. "Shall we turn aside and look at the farm?" Constantia suggested, where the road forked. "No, I think I'd like to drive down to the sea first of all," said the dowager. "Bravo, mother!" both her daughters applauded.