The bailiff looked at her with a little sluggish surprise.  He was not used to being hustled, still less to persons who were ready to pay rather than be kept waiting.  He murmured that he dared say it would be all right, and she must come and look.

They turned to the right up a stony pitch, through a dilapidated gate, and so into the quadrangle of the farm.  To the left was a long row of open cow-sheds, then cow-houses and barns, the stables, a large shed in which stood an old and broken farm cart, and finally the house, fronting the barns.

The house was little more than a large cottage built in the shabbiest way forty years ago, and of far less dignity than the fine old barn on which it looked.  It abutted at one end on the cart-shed, and between it and the line of cow-sheds was the gate into the farmyard.

Miss Henderson stepped up to the house and looked at it.

“It is a poor place!” she said discontentedly; “and those men don’t seem to have done much to it yet.”

Hastings admitted it.  But they had done a little, he said, shamefacedly, and he unlocked the door.  Miss Henderson lingered outside a moment.

“I never noticed,” she said, “that the living room goes right through.  What draughts there’ll be in the winter!”

For as she stood looking into the curtainless window that fronted the farm-yard, she saw through it a further window at the back of the room, and beyond that a tree.  Both windows were large and seemed to take up most of the wall on either side of the small room.  The effect was peculiarly comfortless, as though no one living in the room could possibly enjoy any shred of privacy.  There were no cosy corners in it anywhere, and Miss Henderson’s fancy imagined rows of faces looking in.

Inside a little papering and whitewashing had been done, but certainly the place looked remarkably unviting.  A narrow passage ran from front to back, on one side of which was the living room with the two windows, while on the other were the kitchen and scullery.  Upstairs there were two good-sized bedrooms with a small third room in a lean-to at the back, the lower part of which was occupied by a wash-house.  Through the windows could be seen a neglected bit of garden, and an untidy orchard.

But when she had wandered about the rooms a little, Rachel Henderson’s naturally buoyant temperament reasserted itself.  She had brought some bright patterns of distemper with her which she gave to Hastings with precise instructions.  She had visions of casement curtains to hide the nakedness of the big windows with warm serge curtains to draw over them in the winter.  The floors must be stained.  There should be a deep Indian-red drugget in the sitting-room, with pigeon-blue walls, and she thought complacently of the bits of old furniture she had been collecting, which were stored in a friend’s flat in town.  An old dresser, a grandfather’s clock, some bits of brass, two arm-chairs, an old oak table—­it