And the Old Grange was not a day older than Queen Anne or a day younger.  It was the most perfect specimen of a Queen Anne house you could have wished to see—­the long, straight front, the slender door, the two storeys with their rows of straight, flat windows and the steep brows of the dormers over them.  It was all rose-red brick and rose-red tiles, with roses and clematis bursting out in crimson and purple all over the front.  It stood at right angles to the wall and to the lane, and there was a long grass-garden in front of it, with walls all round and herbaceous borders under the walls; and from the high postern door in the outer wall opening to the lane a wide flagged path went all the way in front of the house to the door in the inner wall that led into the kitchen garden and the orchard.  Further down the lane were the doors of the courtyard at the back of the house where the outhouses and the stables and the dovecot were; and beyond the courtyard there was a paddock, and you would have thought that was enough.  But, besides his Queen Anne house and his gardens and his orchard and his courtyard and his dovecot and his paddock, Jimmy had acquired ten acres of moorland, to say nothing of a belt of pinewood that ran the whole length of his estate behind the kitchen garden and the paddock and the moor.  And the whole business of acquiring this property went without a hitch.  He took it on the long tail-end of a lease from an impecunious landlord who couldn’t afford to keep it up.

He obtained possession by September and in the early spring of nineteen-fourteen he was settled in Amershott Old Grange.

They furnished it as they had furnished the house in Edwardes Square, with the most complete return to beautiful simplicity.

Jimmy polished off a short novel and a play between October and June, and kept himself going on the proceeds of his old novels, his old plays, and his old short stories collected in a volume.  Then I think he must have sat down to wait events.

For when we went down to stay with them we found him waiting.  He was entirely prepared for certain contingencies.  If anybody knew anything about English social conditions it was Tasker Jevons.  He had calculated all the chances and provided for the ostracism that attends the inexpert invader of the country-side.  He was aware that there were powers in and around Amershott that were not to be conciliated.  The very fact that their territory lay so near the frontier (Amershott is only sixty-seven miles from London) kept them on their guard.  To any good old county family, Tasker Jevons’s celebrity was nothing, if it was not an added offence, and his opulence was less than nothing.  In settling among them he ran the risk of being ignored.  But when it came to ignoring, Jimmy considered that success lay with the party who got in first.  So before he settled he took care to diffuse a sort of impression that the Tasker Jevonses were never at home to anybody, that it was not to be expected that a great novelist and playwright would have time for calling and being called on, even if he had the absurd inclination.  He had one solitary introduction in the neighbourhood, and he worked it very adroitly, not to obtain other introductions, but to spread the rumour of retirement and exclusiveness.