“I’ve been at it, sir, for near an hour.”

“You’ve got some damp wood.  What about the drawing-room?”

He threw open a door on the right.  The others followed him in.

The open door revealed a room of singular architectural charm; an oval room panelled in dark oak, with a stucco ceiling, in free Italianate design.  But within its stately and harmonious walls a single oil lamp, of the cheapest and commonest pattern, emitting a strong smell of paraffin, threw its light upon furniture, quite new, that most seaside lodgings would have disdained; viz., a cheap carpet of a sickly brown, leaving edges of bare boards between itself and the wainscot; an ugly “suite” covered with crimson rep, such as only a third-rate shop in a small provincial town could have provided; with a couple of tables, and a “chiffonier,” of the kind that is hawked on barrows in an East End street.

Mr. Tyson looked at the room uneasily.  He had done his best with the ridiculous sum provided; but of course it was all wrong.

He passed on silently through a door in the wainscoting of the drawing-room.  The others again followed, Thyrza’s mouth twitching with laughter.

Another large room, almost dark, with a few guttering candles on the table.  Mrs. Dixon went hastily to the fire and stirred it up.  Then a dining-table spread for supper was seen, and a few chairs.  Everything here was as cheap and nasty as in the drawing-room, including the china and glass on the table.

Thyrza pointed to the ceiling.

“That’s a pity howivver!” she said.  “Yo’ might ha’ had it mended up a bit, Mr. Tyson.  Why t’ rats will be coomin’ through!”

She spoke with the pert assurance of a pretty girl who is only playing the servant “to oblige.”  The agent looked irritably at the ugly gap in the fine tracing overhead, and then at Thyrza.

“Mind your own business, please, Miss Thyrza!” And he walked quickly on toward a farther door.

Thyrza flushed, and made a face at him as he turned his back.  The Dixons followed the agent into the next room, Mrs. Dixon throwing behind her an injunction to Thyrza to run upstairs and give a last look to the bedrooms.

“Why isn’t there a light here?” said the agent impatiently.  He struck one from some matches in his pocket, and Mrs. Dixon hastily brought a candle from a huge writing-table standing in the middle of the floor.

Except for that writing-table, and some fine eighteenth-century bookcases, brass-latticed, which ran round the walls, fitting their every line and moulding with delicate precision, the room was entirely empty.  Moreover, the bookcases did not hold a single book, and the writing-table was bare.  But for any person of taste, looking round him in the light of the candle which Mrs. Dixon held, the room was furnished.  All kinds of human and civilized suggestion breathed from the table and the bookcases.  The contriving mind, with all its happy arts for the cheating and adorning of life, was to be felt.