The whole thing did not take more than three-quarters of an hour.  Coffee was brought in, very strong and good.  Some of the party went off, and Father Payne disappeared.  I went to the smoking-room with two of the men, and we talked a little.  Finally I went away to my room, and tried to commit my impressions of the whole thing to my diary before I went to bed.  It certainly seemed a happy life, and I was struck with the curious mixture of freedom, frankness, and yet courtesy about the whole.  There was no roughness or wrangling or stupidity, nor had I any sense either of exclusion, or of being elaborately included in the life of the circle.  I would call the atmosphere brotherly, if brotherliness did not often mean the sort of frankness which is so unpleasant to strangers.  There certainly was an atmosphere about it, and I felt too that Father Payne, for all his easiness, had somehow got the reins in his hands.

The next morning I went down to breakfast, which was, I found, like breakfast at a club, as Vincent had said.  It was a plain meal—­cold bacon, a vast dish of scrambled eggs kept hot by a spirit lamp and a hot-water arrangement.  You could make toast for yourself if you wished, and there was a big fresh loaf, with excellent butter, marmalade, and jam—­not an ascetic breakfast at all.  There were daily papers on the table, and no one talked.  I did not see Father Payne, who must have come in later.

After breakfast, Barthrop showed me the rooms of the house.  The library was fitted up with bookshelves and easy-chairs for reading, with a big round oak table in the centre.  The floor was of stained oak boards and covered with rugs.  There was also a capacious smoking-room, and I learned that smoking was not allowed elsewhere.  It was, in fact, a solid old family mansion of some dignity.  There were three or four oil paintings in all the rooms, portraits and landscapes.  The general tone of decoration was dark—­red wall-papers and fittings stained brown.  It was all clean and simple, and there was a total absence of ornament, I went and walked in the garden, which was of the same very straightforward kind—­plain grass, shrubberies, winding paths, with comfortable wooden seats in sheltered places; one or two big beds, evidently of old-fashioned perennials, and some trellises for ramblers.  The garden was adjoined by a sort of wilderness, with big trees and ground-ivy, and open spaces in which aconites and snowdrops were beginning to show themselves.  Father Payne, I gathered, was fond of the garden and often worked there; but there were no curiosities—­it was all very simple.  Beyond that were pasture-fields, with a good many clumps and hedgerow trees, running down to a stream, which had been enlarged into a deep pool at one place, where there was a timbered bathing-shed.  The stream fed, through little sluices, a big, square pond, full, I was told, in summer of bulrushes and water-lilies.  I noticed a couple of lawn-tennis