The Manor farm had been cut up into building lots; the Moot, as the land under the Kneb crowned by the parish-church was still called, would shortly follow suit; and Saffrons Croft, with its glory of great elms that stood like a noble tapestry between the Downs and the sea, was being turned by a progressive Town Council into a public park. At the back of Church Street old and new met and clashed unhappily; a walnut peeping amid houses, an ancient fig tree prisoned in a back yard, a length of grim flint wall patching red brick. Here a row of substantial blue-slated houses, larger than cottages, less pretentious than villas, each with its tiny garden characteristic of its occupant, stood at right angle to the Downs and looked across open ground to Beech-hangar and the spur which hides Beau-nez from view. A white house across the way, standing apart in pharisaic aloofness amid a gloom of unhappy-seeming trees, told that this was Rectory Walk. At the end of the Walk a new road set a boundary to the town. Beyond the road a dark crescent-sea of cultivated land washed the foot of the Downs which rose here steep as a green curtain, shutting off with radiant darkness the wonder-world that lay beyond in the light of setting suns. No. 60 was almost opposite the Rectory. Mr. Trupp, as he entered the gate, remarked that in the upper window of the house there was a chocolate coloured card, on which was printed in deep grooved silver letters the word _Apartments_. A woman opened to him, but kept the door upon the chain. Through the crack he glanced at her, and saw at once that but for her hardness she would have been beautiful, while even in her hardness there was something of the quality of a sword. "Is Mr. Caspar in?" he asked. "Yes," she answered. Whether the woman was surly or suspicious, he wasn't sure; but she undid the chain. "Will you step inside?" she said, thawing ever so little. "Mr. Trupp, isn't it?" She stood back to let him pass. Her blue overall, falling straight to her feet, showed the fine lines of her figure; her eyes met his straight as the point of a lance and much the colour of one; her lips were fine almost to cruelty, her nose fine; she was fine all through as an aristocrat, if her accent and manner were those of a small shop-keeper; and her colouring was of finest porcelain. She showed him into the room upon the right.