The old man’s eyes glistened.

“And you’ve come to stay, sir?”

“All my life, Starling,” said Hugh.

They entered the hall.  It was wide and cool, white panelled to the ceiling, with a dark oak floor.  At the back of it was an eighteenth-century stairway, with a band of red carpet running up the steps, and a wrought-iron guard with a velvet-covered rail.  Halfway up, the stairway divided at a landing, lighted by great triple windows of small panes.

“You may have breakfast in half an hour, Starling,” said Chiltern, and led Honora up the stairs into the east wing, where he flung open one of the high mahogany doors on the south side.  “These are your rooms, Honora.  I have had Keller do them all over for you, and I hope you’ll like them.  If you don’t, we’ll change them again.”

Her answer was an exclamation of delight.  There was a bedroom in pink, with brocaded satin on the walls, and an oriel window thrust out over the garden; a panelled boudoir at the corner of the house, with a marble mantel before which one of Marie Antoinette’s duchesses had warmed her feet; and shelves lined with gold-lettered books.  From its windows, across the flowering shrubbery and through the trees, she saw the gleaming waters of a lake, and the hills beyond.  From this view she turned, and caught her breath, and threw her arms about her husband’s neck.  He was astonished to see that her eyes were filled with tears.

“Oh, Hugh,” she cried, “it’s too perfect!  It almost makes me afraid.”

“We will be very happy, dearest,” he said, and as he kissed her he laughed at the fates.

“I hope so—­I pray so,” she said, as she clung to him.  “But—­don’t laugh,—­I can’t bear it.”

He patted her cheek.

“What a strange little girl you are!” he said.  “I suppose I shouldn’t be mad about you if you weren’t that way.  Sometimes I wonder how many women I have married.”

She smiled at him through her tears.

“Isn’t that polygamy, Hugh?” she asked.

It was all like a breathless tale out of one of the wonder books of youth.  So, at least, it seemed to Honora as she stood, refreshed with a new white linen gown, hesitating on the threshold of her door before descending.  Some time the bell must ring, or the cock crow, or the fairy beckon with a wand, and she would have to go back.  Back where?  She did not know—­she could not remember.  Cinderella dreaming by the embers, perhaps.

He was awaiting her in the little breakfast room, its glass casements open to the garden with the wall and the round stone seat.  The simmering urn, the white cloth, the shining silver, the big green melons that the hot summer sun had ripened for them alone, and Hugh’s eyes as they rested on her—­such was her illusion.  Nor was it quite dispelled when he lighted a pipe and they started to explore their Eden, wandering through chambers with, low ceilings in the old part of the house, and larger, higher apartments in the portion that was called new.  In the great darkened library, side by side against the Spanish leather on the walls, hung the portraits of his father and mother in heavy frames of gilt.