than Stonehenge.  This used to run all the way to Canfleet—­that’s where Kerith Island touches the mainland—­but it’s all gone but this part here....”  She disliked the road when it took a disclaiming twist and left the houses out of sight and travelled between low oaks, because it was the road home, and she would never have chosen a home in this strange place, whose lack of meaning for herself could be measured by its plentitude of meaning for this woman who was so unlike her.

Certainly she would never have chosen this home.  Very thick, trim hedges gave the long garden the look of a pound; the standard rose-trees which grew in round flower-beds on the lawn, which was of that excessively deep green that grass takes on in gardens with a north aspect, had the air of being detained in custody, and the borders on each side of the broad gravel path showed that extreme neatness which is found in places of detention.  The red brick farmhouse at its end was very small, and its windows such mere square peep-holes among a strong growth of ivy that one conceived its inhabitants as being able to see the light only by pressing their faces close against the glass.

“Oh, I know it’s ugly!” muttered Marion, holding back the gate for her.  “I should have had it pulled down when I built on the new rooms.  But it’s been here two hundred years, and there are some of the beams of the house that was here before in it, and we have lived here all the time, so it was too great a responsibility to destroy it.”  She looked sideways at the girl’s clouded face, and explained desperately, “I couldn’t, you know.  When people don’t understand why you did things, and say you did them because you had no respect for good old established decencies of life, you become most carefully conservative!”

But confidence could not be maintained for long at this awkward pitch, and she went on to the front door.  “You’ll like our roses,” she said hopefully, as they waited for it to open; “they grow wonderfully on this Essex clay.”  But although there was evident in that an amiable desire to please, Ellen was again alienated by the cool smile with which Marion greeted the maid who opened the door, the uninterested “Good morning, Mabel.”  The girl looked so pleased to see them.  Marion returned, too, to this curious idea of hers about not being able to destroy ugly things just because they are old, although of course it is one’s plain duty to replace ugly things with beautiful whatever the circumstances, when they stepped in, through no intervening hall or passage, to a little dark room furnished, as farm parlours are, with a grandfather clock, an oak settle, a dresser, a gate-leg table with a patchwork cloth over it, and samplers hanging on wallpaper of a trivial rosebud pattern.  “I hate this English farmhouse stuff,” she said.  “Heavy and uninventive.  The Yaverlands have been well-to-do for at least four hundred years, and they never took the trouble to have a single thing