made with any particular appositeness to themselves.  But I have left this room as it was.  To have it disturbed would have been like turning my grandmother’s ghost out of doors, and I troubled her enough in her lifetime.  But look!  It’s all right in the rooms I’ve built on.”  She held back a door, and they looked into a shining room lined with white panels and lit by wide windows that admitted much of the vast sky.  “But I’ll take you to your room.  It’s in the old part of the house.  But I think you will like it.  It’s a room I’m fond of....”

They climbed a steep dark staircase, and Marion opened a low thatched door in which the light, obscured by drawn chintz curtains, fell on cream walls and a bed, with its high headpiece made of fine wood painted green, and a great press made of the same.  “There’s a step down,” she said, “and the floor rakes, but I’m fond of the room.  I slept here when I was a girl; but all the things are new—­I got them down from London; and I had the walls done.  So you have a fresh start.”  She went to the chintz curtains and pulled them back, disclosing a very large window that came down to within two feet of the floor and looked on to a farmyard.  “It’s a good-sized window, isn’t it?” she said.  “There’s a story about that.  They say my great-grandfather, William Yaverland, was as mean as he was jealous, and as jealous as he was mean, and in middle life he was crippled by a kick from a horse and bedridden ever after.  He’d a very pretty young wife, and a handsome overseer who was a very capable chap and worth hundreds a year to the farm, and it struck him that in his new state he’d probably not be able to keep the one without losing the other.  So he had this window knocked out so that he could lie in his bed and keep his eye on the dairy where his wife worked and see who went in and came out.  Well, now it’ll let the morning sun in on you.”

She sat down on the windowseat, and with a sense of fulfilment watched the girl move delightedly among the new things, touching the little white wreaths on the embroidered bedspread and tracing the delicate grain with her forefinger, and coming to a stop before the mirror and looking at her face with a solemn respectful vanity because it had pleased her beloved.  Marion found this very right and fitting, because to her, in spite of the story of this window, this room had always been sacred to the spirit of young love.  She turned her head and looked out into the farmyard.  When the land had been let out to neighbouring cultivators the byres and outhouses had all been pulled down, and the yard was now only a quadrangle of grey trodden earth, having on its further side a wall-less shed in which there were stacked all the billets that had been cut from the spinneys on the land they retained, bound neatly with the black branches fluting together and a fuzz of purple twigs at each end.