Jeanne, who was sitting opposite, lifted her remarkable eyes and glanced around with interest.

“Yes,” she admitted, “I think that it is!  But then, any place that looks in the least like a home is a delightful change after all that rushing about in London.”

“I agree with you entirely,” Major Forrest declared.  “If our friend has disappointed us at all, it is in the absence of that primitiveness which he led us to expect.  One perceives that one is drinking Veuve Clicquot of a vintage year, and one suspects the nationality of our host’s cook.”

“You can have all the primitivism you want if you look out of the windows,” Cecil remarked drily.  “You will see nothing but a line of stunted trees, and behind, miles of marshes and the greyest sea which ever played upon the land.  Listen!  You don’t hear a sound like that in the cities.”

Even as he spoke they heard the dull roar of the north wind booming across the wild empty places which lay between the Red Hall and the sea.  A storm of raindrops was flung against the window.  The Princess shivered.

“It is an idyll, the last word in the refining of sensations,” Major Forrest declared.  “You give us sybaritic luxury, and in order that we shall realize it, you provide the background of savagery.  In the Carlton one might dine like this and accept it as a matter of course.  Appreciation is forced upon us by these suggestions of the wilderness without.”

“Not all without, either,” Cecil de la Borne remarked, raising his eyeglass and pointing to the walls.  “See where my ancestors frown down upon us—­you can only just distinguish their bare shapes.  No De la Borne has had money enough to have them renovated or even preserved.  They have eaten their way into the canvases, and the canvases into the very walls.  You see the empty spaces, too.  A Reynolds and a Gainsboro’ have been cut out from there and sold.  I can show you long empty galleries, pictureless, and without a scrap of furniture.  We have ghosts like rats, rooms where the curtains and tapestries are falling to pieces from sheer decay.  Oh!  I can assure you that our primitivism is not wholly external.”

He turned from the Princess, who was not greatly interested, to find that for once he had succeeded in riveting the attention of the girl, whose general attitude towards him and the whole world seemed to be one of barely tolerant indifference.

“I should like to see over your house, Mr. De la Borne,” she said.  “It all sounds very interesting.”

“I am afraid,” he answered, “that your interest would not survive very long.  We have no treasures left, nor anything worth looking at.  For generations the De la Bornes have stripped their house and sold their lands to hold their own in the world.  I am the last of my race, and there is nothing left for me to sell,” he declared, with a momentary bitterness.

“Hadn’t you—­a half brother?” the Princess asked.