Sarah Brown and the witch were left in a small room that opened on to the great hall.  It was furnished rather like a lodging-house parlour.  There was a thermometer elaborately disguised as a model of the Eddystone Lighthouse on the mantelpiece, flanked on each side by a china boot in pink, with real bootlaces, and a pig looking out of the top of each.  There were pictures on the walls, mostly representing young ladies, more or less obviously in love, supported by rustic properties.  I have noticed that the girl’s first love is the monopoly of the Victorian painter, whereas the boy’s is that of the novelist, but I do not know the reason of this.

There was a slight clap of thunder and Richard entered.  He would have been very obviously a wizard even without the thunder, and seemed much less innocent about his magic than the witch.  He had pale hair, a pale face, and eyes that did not open wide without a certain effort on the part of the brows.

“You are despising my ornaments,” he said to Sarah Brown.  “I admire them awfully.  I don’t like really clever art.  Do you know, it makes me sneeze.”

Directly he spoke, one saw that he was making the usual effort of magic to appear real.  Witches and wizards lead difficult lives because they have no ancestry working within them to prompt them in the little details.  Whenever you see a person being unusually grown-up, suspect them of magic.  You can always notice witches and wizards, for instance, after eight o’clock at night, pretending that they are not proud of sitting up late.  It is all nonsense about witches being night birds; they often fly about at night, indeed, but only because they are like permanent children gloriously escaped for ever from their Nanas.

“This picture,” added Richard, “seems to me very beautiful.”  The picture might have cost a shilling originally, framed, or it might have been attached to a calendar once.  It was a landscape so thick in colouring and so lightless that it failed to give an outdoor impression at all.  There was a river and waterfall like well-combed hair in the middle, and a dozen leaden mountains lying about with—­apparently—­pocket-handkerchiefs on their tops, and a dropsical-looking stag drinking.  “I can’t imagine,” insisted Richard, “that there could be a more beautiful picture than that, but perhaps it appeals to me specially because father and mother and I so often talk about the place together—­the place like that, near to the mountain where I was born.  That was in the Rockies, you know, and just below our mountain I am sure there was a canyon like that—­I dream of it—­with milky-green water running under and over and round the most extraordinary shapes of ice, and cactuses like green hedgehogs in the crevices of the rocks, and great untidy pine-trees clinging to an ounce of earth on an inch of flat surface.  And the rocks are a most splendid rose-red, and lie in steep layers, and break out into shapes that are so deliberate, they look as if they must mean something.  Indeed they do....”