’Oh yes.  You’ll never see it in the morning, but—­you was out when they came ‘ome an’ Mister Fisher—­he’s the Master—­told me to tell you with ‘is compliments that if you wasn’t preservin’ and cared to ’old to the old understanding’, is gravel-pit is at your service same as before.  ’E thought, perhaps, you mightn’t know, and it ’ad slipped my mind to tell you.  It’s good gravel, Mister Fisher’s, and it binds beautiful on the drive.  We ‘ave to draw it, o’ course, from the pit, but—­’

Midmore looked at her helplessly.

‘Rhoda,’ said he, ‘what am I supposed to do?’

’Oh, let ’em come through,’ she replied.  ’You never know.  You may want to ‘unt yourself some day.’

That evening it rained and his misery returned on him, the worse for having been diverted.  At last he was driven to paw over a few score books in a panelled room called the library, and realised with horror what the late Colonel Werf’s mind must have been in its prime.  The volumes smelt of a dead world as strongly as they did of mildew.  He opened and thrust them back, one after another, till crude coloured illustrations of men on horses held his eye.  He began at random and read a little, moved into the drawing-room with the volume, and settled down by the fire still reading.  It was a foul world into which he peeped for the first time—­a heavy-eating, hard-drinking hell of horse-copers, swindlers, matchmaking mothers, economically dependent virgins selling themselves blushingly for cash and lands:  Jews, tradesmen, and an ill-considered spawn of Dickens-and-horsedung characters (I give Midmore’s own criticism), but he read on, fascinated, and behold, from the pages leaped, as it were, the brother to the red-eyed man of the brook, bellowing at a landlord (here Midmore realised that he was that very animal) for new barns; and another man who, like himself again, objected to hoof-marks on gravel.  Outrageous as thought and conception were, the stuff seemed to have the rudiments of observation.  He dug out other volumes by the same author, till Rhoda came in with a silver candlestick.

‘Rhoda,’ said he, ’did you ever hear about a character called James Pigg—­and Batsey?’

‘Why, o’ course,’ said she.  ’The Colonel used to come into the kitchen in ‘is dressin’-gown an’ read us all those Jorrockses.’

‘Oh, Lord!’ said Midmore, and went to bed with a book called Handley Cross under his arm, and a lonelier Columbus into a stranger world the wet-ringed moon never looked upon.

* * * * *

Here we omit much.  But Midmore never denied that for the epicure in sensation the urgent needs of an ancient house, as interpreted by Rhoda pointing to daylight through attic-tiles held in place by moss, gives an edge to the pleasure of Social Research elsewhere.  Equally he found that the reaction following prolonged research loses much of its grey terror if one knows one can at will bathe the soul in the society of plumbers (all the water-pipes had chronic appendicitis), village idiots (Jimmy had taken Midmore under his weak wing and camped daily at the drive-gates), and a giant with red eyelids whose every action is an unpredictable outrage.