The eloquence of her own thoughts possessed her.  They flowed on in a warm, mute rhetoric, till suddenly the Comic Spirit was there, and patriotic rapture began to see itself.  She, the wanderer, the exile, what did she know of England—­or England of her?  What did she know of this village even, this valley in which she had pitched her tent?  She had taken an old house, because it had pleased her fancy, because it had Tudor gables, pretty panelling, and a sundial.  But what natural link had she with it, or with these peasants and countrymen?  She had no true roots here.  What she had done was mere whim and caprice.  She was an alien, like anybody else—­like the new men and prowling millionaires, who bought old English properties, moved thereto by a feeling which was none the less snobbish because it was also sentimental.

She drew herself up—­rebelling hotly—­yet not seeing how to disentangle herself from these associates.  And she was still struggling to put herself back in the romantic mood, and to see herself and her experiment anew in the romantic light, when her maid knocked at the door, and distraction entered with letters, and a cup of tea.

* * * * *

An hour later Miss Mallory left her room behind her, and went tripping down the broad oak staircase of Beechcote Manor.

By this time romance was uppermost again, and self-congratulation.  She was young—­just twenty-two; she was—­she knew it—­agreeable to look upon; she had as much money as any reasonable woman need want; she had already seen a great deal of the world outside England; and she had fallen headlong in love with this charming old house, and had now, in spite of various difficulties, managed to possess herself of it, and plant her life in it.  Full of ghosts it might be; but she was its living mistress henceforth; nor was it either ridiculous or snobbish that she should love it and exult in it—­quite the contrary.  And she paused on the slippery stairs, to admire the old panelled hall below, the play of wintry sunlight on the oaken surfaces she herself had rescued from desecrating paint, and the effect of some old Persian rugs, which had only arrived from London the night before, on the dark polished boards.  For Diana, there were two joys connected with the old house:  the joy of entering in, a stranger and conqueror, on its guarded and matured beauty, and the joy of adding to that beauty by a deft modernness.  Very deft, and tender, and skilful it must be.  But no one could say that time-worn Persian rugs, with their iridescent blue and greens and rose reds—­or old Italian damask and cut-velvet from Genoa, or Florence, or Venice—­were out of harmony with the charming Jacobean rooms.  It was the horrible furniture of the Vavasours, the ancestral possessors of the place, which had been an offence and a disfigurement.  In moving it out and replacing it, Diana felt that she had become the spiritual child of the old house, in spite of her alien blood.  There is a kinship not of the flesh; and it thrilled all through her.