“And this clock I am going to have in the drawing-room, and these Salviati glasses.  Then, when I have moved out the piano, I shall put the sofa in its place, and my own little table, with my pretty Florentine ornaments.”

Raymond again looked annoyed.  “Have you spoken to my mother?” he said.

“No; she never goes there.”

“Not now, but if ever she can bear any move it will be her first change, and I should not like to interfere with her arrangements.”

“She could never have been a musician, to let the piano stand against the wall.  I shall never be able to play.”

“Perhaps that might be contrived,” said Raymond, kindly. “Here you know is your own domain, where you can do as you please.”

“Yes; but I am expected to play in the evening.  Look at all those things.  I had kept the choicest for the drawing-room, and it is such a pity to hide them all up here.”

Raymond felt for the mortification, and was unwilling to cross her again, so he said, “I will ask whether my mother would object to having the piano moved.”

“This morning?”

“After eleven o’clock—­I never disturb her sooner; but you shall hear before I go to Backsworth.”

“An hour lost,” thought Cecil; but she was too well bred to grumble, and she had her great work to carry on of copying and illustrating her journal.

Mrs. Poynsett readily consented.  “Oh yes, my dear, let her do whatever she likes.  Don’t let me be a bugbear.  A girl is never at home till she has had her will of the furniture.  I think she will find that moving out the piano betrays the fading of the rest of the paper, but that is her affair.  She is free to do just as she likes.  I dare say the place does look antediluvian to young eyes.”

So Raymond was the bearer of his mother’s full permission; and Cecil presided with great energy over the alterations, which she carried out by the aid of the younger servants, to the great disgust of their seniors.  She expected the acclamations of her contemporaries; but it happened that the first of them to cross the room was Julius, on his way to his mother’s room after luncheon, and he, having on a pair of make-shift glasses, till the right kind could be procured from London, was unprepared for obstacles in familiar regions, stumbled over an ottoman, and upset a table with the breakage of a vase.

He apologized, with much regret; but the younger brothers made an outcry.  “What has come to the place?  Here’s the table all over everything!”

“And where are the bronzes?”

“And the humming-birds?  Miles’s birds, that he brought home after his first voyage.”

“And the clock with the two jolly little Cupids?  Don’t you remember Miles and Will Bowater dressing them up for men-of-war’s men?  Mother could not bring herself to have them undressed for a year, and all the time the clock struck nohow!”