Barry opened the front door with some difficulty, and they stepped into the musty emptiness of the big main hall.  There was a stairway at the back of the house with a colored glass window on the landing, and through it the sunlight streamed, showing the old velvet carpet in the hall below, and the carved heavy walnut chairs and tables, and the old engravings in their frames of oak and walnut mosaic.  The visitors peeped into the old library, odorous of unopened books, and with great curtains of green rep shutting out the light, and into the music room behind it, cold even on this warm day, with a muffled grand piano drawn free of the walls, and near it two piano-stools, upholstered in blue-fringed rep, to match the curtains and chairs.  They went across the hall to the long, dim drawing room, where there was another velvet carpet, dulled to a red pink by time, and muffled pompous sofas and chairs, and great mirrors, and “sets” of candlesticks and vases on the mantels and what-nots.  The windows were shuttered here, the air lifeless.  Barry, in George Carew’s interest, felt bound to say that “they would clear all this up, you know; a lot of this stuff could be stored.”

“Oh, why store it?  It’s perfectly good,” the lady answered absently.

Presently they went out to the more cheerful dining-room, which ran straight across the house, and was low-ceiled, with pleasant square-paned windows on two sides.

“This was the old house,” explained Barry; “they added on the front part.  You could do a lot with this room.”

“Do you still smell spice, and apples, and cider here?” said Mrs. Burgoyne, turning from an investigation of the china-closet, with a radiant face.  A moment later she caught her breath suddenly, and walked across the room to stand, resting her hands on a chair back, before a large portrait that hung above the fireplace.  She stood so, gazing at the picture—­the portrait of a woman—­for a full minute, and when she turned again to Barry, her eyes were bright with tears.

“That’s Mrs. Holly,” said she.  “Emily said that picture was here.”  And turning back to the canvas, she added under her breath, “You darling!”

“Did you know her?” Barry asked, surprised.

“Did I know her!” Mrs. Burgoyne echoed softly, without turning.  “Yes, I knew her,” she added, almost musingly.  And then suddenly she said, “Come, let’s look upstairs,” and led the way by the twisted sunny back stairway, which had a window on every landing and Crimson Rambler roses pressing against every window.  They looked into several bedrooms, all dusty, close, sunshiny.  In the largest of these, a big front corner room, carpeted in dark red, with a black marble fireplace and an immense walnut bed, Mrs. Burgoyne, looking through a window that she had opened upon the lovely panorama of river and woods, said suddenly: 

“This must be my room, it was hers.  She was the best friend, in one way, that I ever had—­Mrs. Holly.  How happy I was here!”