Jerome gazed round the room. Despite the age and decrepitude of all in it, it had a certain attraction for him, from its quaint, unconventional shape and arrangements. The stairs, with old oaken rails and balustrade, led straight out of it. A door which he opened, showed him a roomy kitchen, with a back-kitchen beyond. Turning back, he opened the door to the left of the passage, which he had not yet explored, and found a second sitting-room, smaller than the first, but just as quaint, low and irregular. This room, too, had the agreeable peculiarity of a corner fireplace, and it contained more furniture than the other; very old drawing-room furniture—thin-legged chairs and tables, and a strange-looking thing which was at once cupboard, cabinet, and press, to match the rest of the furniture, which was mahogany. The aforesaid thin-legged chairs were upholstered in a sickly, faded drab damask—relic of a bygone day. The whole place looked like some grave, and yet a grave about which lingered gentle memories, like a soft perfume; recollections of old-fashioned ladies who must have spent countless hours at their tambour-frames, embroidering those elaborate and now pale and faded semblances of pink-cheeked shepherds and blue-eyed shepherdesses which adorned some spindly-looking stools and spider-legged ‘occasional’ chairs. Whose slender fingers had accomplished that triumph of worsted-work which covered a large settee beneath one of the two little deep square windows—a piece of worsted-work with a whole picture upon it, of an elaborate landscape; figures, fountains, sheep, and marble vases? Jerome passed his hand across his eyes, feeling as if he had lost his identity. Was it—could it be he, Jerome Wellfield, who was standing in this chill, pale, silent place, inhaling the faint, musty, dusty smell, which carries one back full a hundred years; and was this dim old place his home—all the home he now had? He tried to picture Avice there, and succeeded. It would be no inappropriate place for her, he felt, when fires should have dried up all the damp, and when all this faded furniture should have been pulled forth, cleaned, and polished, and arranged. And Sara? Try as he would, he failed to see her there. And yet, he knew that should he ask her to come, she would do so. He climbed the stairs, and found several bedrooms, corresponding with the rooms below—all with the same raftered roofs, and odd little square windows, made almost dark, too, by the overhanging trailing-plants which covered the side of the house.