As I followed her down the stairs that led to the Tudor hall she paused suddenly on the landing where a second lion marked the turn.  She had her finger to her lip.  We drew back.  But not before I had looked down over the balustrade into the hall and seen Jimmy sitting on one of the thrones with the lilies of France, and Viola crouching beside him on the rug with her head hidden on his knee.

He had his hands on her forehead and was saying, “It’s all right.  Do you suppose I don’t understand?”

XI

It was late in August before Jevons found a country house large enough, yet not too large, and old enough, yet not too old—­he would have nothing that even remotely suggested the Tudor period.  And in the intervals of looking for his house he wrote another novel and two more plays.  There was a decided falling-off in all of them, and I think Jevons himself was a little nervous.  He said he’d have to be careful next time or they’d find him out.  Once he had settled the affair of the house he would set to work and strengthen the position which, after all, he hadn’t lost.

He had gained, if anything.  Nineteen-thirteen stands as his year of maximum prosperity.  Even the house in Mayfair justified itself when he let it, with all its principal rooms furnished, to an American railway magnate at a rent that enabled him to indulge the passion he had conceived for Amershott Old Grange.

He used to say he would never have been happy again if he couldn’t have had Amershott Old Grange.  Everything about it seemed propitious.  They had found it by a happy accident when they weren’t looking for it, weren’t thinking of it, when they were trying to get out of Sussex and back to London after a long day’s motoring in search of houses.  Nothing that Essex or Kent or Buckinghamshire (Hertfordshire was ruled out by the presence in it of the Registrar) or Surrey or Hampshire or Sussex, so far, could do had satisfied them, and Jevons was beginning to talk rather wildly about Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire and Wilts, and even Devon and Cornwall, when they lost their way in the cross-country roads between Midhurst and Petworth and so came upon Amershott Old Grange.  It was hidden behind an old rose-red brick wall in a lane, and it was only by standing up in the motorcar that they caught sight of its long line of red-tiled dormer windows.  The very notice-board was hidden, staggering back in an ivy bush that topped the wall.

“I won’t have a house,” said Jimmy, “that’s a day older than Queen Anne.”  No more would Viola.