Without warning, a moment or so later, Bettina stopped in the middle of the avenue, and looked up at the arching giant branches of the trees which had reached out from one side to the other, as if to clasp hands or encompass an interlacing embrace.  As far as the eye reached, they did this, and the beholder stood as in a high stately pergola, with breaks of deep azure sky between.  Several mellow, cawing rooks were floating solemnly beneath or above the branches, now wand then settling in some highest one or disappearing in the thick greenness.

Lady Anstruthers stopped when her sister did so, and glanced at her in vague inquiry.  It was plain that she had outlived even her sense of the beauty surrounding her.

“What are you looking at, Betty?” she asked.

“At all of it,” Betty answered.  “It is so wonderful.”

“She likes it,” said Ughtred, and then rather slunk a step behind his mother, as if he were ashamed of himself.

“The house is just beyond those trees,” said Lady Anstruthers.

They came in full view of it three minutes later.  When she saw it, Betty uttered an exclamation and stopped again to enjoy effects.

“She likes that, too,” said Ughtred, and, although he said it sheepishly, there was imperfectly concealed beneath the awkwardness a pleasure in the fact.

“Do you?” asked Rosalie, with her small, painful smile.

Betty laughed.

“It is too picturesque, in its special way, to be quite credible,” she said.

“I thought that when I first saw it,” said Rosy.

“Don’t you think so, now?”

“Well,” was the rather uncertain reply, “as Nigel says, there’s not much good in a place that is falling to pieces.”

“Why let it fall to pieces?” Betty put it to her with impartial promptness.

“We haven’t money enough to hold it together,” resignedly.

As they climbed the low, broad, lichen-blotched steps, whose broken stone balustrades were almost hidden in clutching, untrimmed ivy, Betty felt them to be almost incredible, too.  The uneven stones of the terrace the steps mounted to were lichen-blotched and broken also.  Tufts of green growths had forced themselves between the flags, and added an untidy beauty.  The ivy tossed in branches over the red roof and walls of the house.  It had been left unclipped, until it was rather an endlessly clambering tree than a creeper.  The hall they entered had the beauty of spacious form and good, old oaken panelling.  There were deep window seats and an ancient high-backed settle or so, and a massive table by the fireless hearth.  But there were no pictures in places where pictures had evidently once hung, and the only coverings on the stone floor were the faded remnants of a central rug and a worn tiger skin, the head almost bald and a glass eye knocked out.