The hoofs broke into a canter as Rhoda entered with the tray.  ’And then I’ll put you to bed,’ she said.  ‘Sidney’s coming in the morning.’  Midmore asked no questions.  He dragged his poor bruised soul to bed and would have pitied it all over again, but the food and warm sherry and water drugged him to instant sleep.

Rhoda’s voice wakened him, asking whether he would have ’’ip, foot, or sitz,’ which he understood were the baths of the establishment.  ’Suppose you try all three,’ she suggested.  ‘They’re all yours, you know, sir.’

He would have renewed his sorrows with the daylight, but her words struck him pleasantly.  Everything his eyes opened upon was his very own to keep for ever.  The carved four-post Chippendale bed, obviously worth hundreds; the wavy walnut William and Mary chairs—­he had seen worse ones labelled twenty guineas apiece; the oval medallion mirror; the delicate eighteenth-century wire fireguard; the heavy brocaded curtains were his—­all his.  So, too, a great garden full of birds that faced him when he shaved; a mulberry tree, a sun-dial, and a dull, steel-coloured brook that murmured level with the edge of a lawn a hundred yards away.  Peculiarly and privately his own was the smell of sausages and coffee that he sniffed at the head of the wide square landing, all set round with mysterious doors and Bartolozzi prints.  He spent two hours after breakfast in exploring his new possessions.  His heart leaped up at such things as sewing-machines, a rubber-tyred bath-chair in a tiled passage, a malachite-headed Malacca cane, boxes and boxes of unopened stationery, seal-rings, bunches of keys, and at the bottom of a steel-net reticule a little leather purse with seven pounds ten shillings in gold and eleven shillings in silver.

’You used to play with that when my sister brought you down here after your measles,’ said Rhoda as he slipped the money into his pocket.  ’Now, this was your pore dear auntie’s business-room.’  She opened a low door.  ‘Oh, I forgot about Mr. Sidney!  There he is.’  An enormous old man with rheumy red eyes that blinked under downy white eyebrows sat in an Empire chair, his cap in his hands.  Rhoda withdrew sniffing.  The man looked Midmore over in silence, then jerked a thumb towards the door.  ’I reckon she told you who I be,’ he began.  ’I’m the only farmer you’ve got.  Nothin’ goes off my place ’thout it walks on its own feet.  What about my pig-pound?’

‘Well, what about it?’ said Midmore.

’That’s just what I be come about.  The County Councils are getting more particular.  Did ye know there was swine fever at Pashell’s?  There be.  It’ll ‘ave to be in brick.’

‘Yes,’ said Midmore politely.

’I’ve bin at your aunt that was, plenty times about it.  I don’t say she wasn’t a just woman, but she didn’t read the lease same way I did.  I be used to bein’ put upon, but there’s no doing any longer ’thout that pig-pound.’