Etext of The Red House
By E. Nesbit 
New York and London
Harper & Brothers Publishers
Copyright, 1902, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved.
Published October, 1902

THE RED HOUSE A Novel
BY  E. NESBIT

AUTHOR OF "THE TREASURE "THE WOULDBEGOODS," 
    
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. THE BEGINNING 
CHAPTER II. IN THE RED HOUSE
CHAPTER III. THE GHOST
CHAPTER IV. OUR NEW TENANT
CHAPTER V. THE LOAFERY
CHAPTER VI. YOLANDE'S REASONING
CHAPTER VII. THE HOUSE-WARMING
CHAPTER VIII. THE TENANT
CHAPTER IX. MANLY SPORTS 
CHAPTER X. THE INVADERS
CHAPTER XI. THE ROOM FOR CONFIDENCES
CHAPTER XII. THE PUSSY-KITTEN

THE RED HOUSE

CHAPTER I  THE BEGINNING

CONVENTIONALLY our life-story ended in a shower of rice at
the church door, amid the scent of white flowers, with a flutter of
white favors all about us. We left behind us those relatives whose
presence had been so little desired by us during our brief courtship,
and a high-heeled white satin slipper struck the back of the
brougham as we drove off. It was like a parting slap on the
shoulder from our old life--the old life which we left so gayly,
eager to fulfil the destiny set as the end of our wooing's fairy story,
and to "live happy ever after."

And now all that was six months ago; and instead of attending to
that destiny, the fairy princess and her unworthy prince were
plunged over head and ears in their first quarrel--their first serious
quarrel--about the real and earnest things of life; for the other little
quarrels about matters of sentiment and the affections really did
not count. They were only play and make-believe; still, they had
got our hands in, so that when we really differed seriously we both
knew exactly how to behave--we had played at quarrels so often.
This quarrel was very serious, because it was about my
shaving-brush and Chloe's handkerchief-case. There was a
cupboard with a window--Chloe called it my dressing-room, and,
at first, I humored her pretty fancy about it, and pretended that I
could really see to shave in a glass that faced the window, although
my shoulders, as I stood, cut off all light. But even then I used
really to shave at Chloe's mirror after she had gone down to make
the tea and boil the eggs--only I kept my shaving things in the
embroidered vestments which my wife's affection provided and her
fingers worked, and these lived in the "dressing-room." But the
subterfuge presently seemed unworthy, and I found myself, in the
ardor of a truthful nature, leaving my soapy brush on her
toilet-table. Chloe called this untidiness, and worse, and urged that
I had a dressing-room. Then I put the brush away. This had
happened more than once.

On this memorable morning I had set up the pretty ivory
shaving-brush, clean and pleasant with its white crown of lather,
among her hair-brushes. Chloe came up just then to ask me
whether I would have two or three eggs. Her entrance startled me.
I cut myself slightly, but infuriatingly, and knocked the brush
down. It fell on Chloe's handkerchief-case--pink satin, painted with
rose and cupids, a present. Chloe snatched it up.

"You are horrid," she said. "Why don't you shave in your own
dressing-room?"

"Whatever does it matter?" said I.

"My sachet's ruined," she said, dabbing at it with her
pocket-handkerchief.

My chin was still bleeding.

"It's no use," she went on. "I spend all my time trying to keep the
house nice, and you're always putting things down on things. You
put your hateful fountain-pen down on the new drawn-linen
table-centre only yesterday, and it's made a great ink mark. Yes,
you did--when you were writing the check for the butcher."

I was ill-advised enough to murmur something about trifles.

"But they're not trifles," said Chloe. "They're just the little things
that make all the difference between a home and--"

"And?"

"And other places. Breakfast will be quite spoiled. You're
frightfully late. And I don't think this girl means to stay; she's been
quite rude about the haddock already."

Now that I knew what my wife was so cross about, I might,
perhaps--but I didn't. My chin was still bleeding.

I said, "Please don't wait breakfast for me, and began to brush my
hair with a dignified aloofness. Chloe went out, and I own that she
banged the door.

When I was ready I went down to breakfast. Chloe was reading the
paper--a thing she never does. She poured out my tea and gave it to
me without a glance. Thanking her coldly, I helped myself to
haddock and opened my letters.

It was with the second letter that the shock came. I read the letter
twice. And I looked round our little dining-room--it was about ten
feet by nine--and I sighed. For I knew--surely if inexplicably--that
the dove of peace which had folded its wings there had spread
them on a flight from which it would, perhaps, never return. I had
quarrelled with my wife--about a shaving-brush; but that episode
had now shrunk to less than nothing in the presence of the new, the
wonderful danger that threatened our home. I looked at the neat
breakfast-table, bright with our wedding-presents--cruet-stands,
butter-dishes, and silver-plated teaspoons. I looked at the row of
shelves over the mantel-piece, where the more attractive of our
crockery stood displayed; at the corner cupboard, picked up for a
song in Great Portland Street, and fitted with a lock inexorably
guarding the marmalade, the loaf sugar, the sardines, the bottled
beer, and such like costly items. I looked at Chloe, mutinously
reading the paper--in a white muslin blouse which had been green,
with white flowers on it, when we bought it together in the
Lewisham High Street for twopence three farthings the yard, and
which to my mind was all the prettier for the theft, by soap and
water, of its original hue and design. I looked at the remains of the
haddock on the dish, the two eggs in the eggstand--another
wedding-present. And again I sighed.

Chloe laid down the paper irresolutely and looked towards, but not
at, me.

I sighed again and stirred my tea. I could see that Chloe was
making a heroic resolve to overcome her pride and end the quarrel.
She did it.

"Are you sorry you were so cross?" she asked, severely.

"Frightfully sorry." I spoke from the heart.

"Then so am I!" she cried. And suddenly the first quarrel found
itself over. Presently we went on with the breakfast. To be more
accurate, we began. But my thoughts refused to bury themselves in
the beefsteak-pudding which Chloe unfolded as a brilliant dinner
prospect, and I sighed once more.

"What is the matter now? Have you forgotten that you're not cross
any more, and you're never going to be again--or--is the haddock
really like she said?" Chloe asked, making horseshoes in her pretty
forehead, as she always does when life presents to her any problem
not immediately soluble in a laugh or a joke. "Is it another bill?
Never mind! I'll ask them to wait. You'll get the check for that
detective story on Monday, if the editor has a thread of conscience
left, and I'll go up to town to-morrow and draw the money from
old Moses for those last drawings of 'The Holy Life.'"

"It's not a bill, madam," I said, "and Moses can send his money by
post. To-morrow we have another errand. To-day, alas! I must
finish my article for the Weekly Wilderness."

"Do you want to drive me to suicide?" she asked. "Give me the
letter!"

"Allow me," I said, "the melancholy pleasure of communicating its
contents. If you have quite finished your eggs and things you may
come and sit on my knee."

She came and perched there.

"Don't be a pig, Len," she said. "I'm not a baby, to have bad news
broken to me."

Then I put my arm round her and spoke out roundly.

"My dear," I said, "we are ruined."

"Oh, Len, are we really?" said Chloe, much interested.

"Yes," I said, firmly. "Hitherto we've worked for our living and
earned it. Now we are degraded from the ranks of the noble army
of workers. My uncle James has died, and he has left us a hundred
a year and a house. Our independence gone--it's a cruel blow!
We'll ride over and see it to-morrow as ever is."

I am not sure that Chloe did not weep for joy. Though as a rule,
one knows, that sort of weeping is only done in books. You see, we
really had worked so very, very hard. However much in love one
may be, one does not like to work ten hours a day. Though two
may not grudge it as the price of life together. I wrote, Chloe
illustrated--we worked hard--hard--hard, and earned enough to
keep body and soul and the two of us together in our microscopic
house. "The Bandbox" we called it, but on its gatepost it called
itself Ross Villa. And now--a hundred a year, and a house--such a
house. It came back to me out of my youth, a monument of
comfortable affluence, with vineries and pineries, and pits and
frames, clean-shaved lawns and trim orchards, yew avenues, box
edgings, stabling and coach-houses and pigsties and henneries.
Chloe and I clung together in an ecstasy, till "the girl" came in to
clear away breakfast. I never saw anything more dramatic than the
way in which she indicated, as she bore out the empty dish, that
her opinion of the haddock was not only entirely unaltered, but
indeed confirmed, by our having eaten it.

My article for the Weekly Wilderness got itself written somehow,
but with difficulty, for Chloe, demoralized by our good fortune,
interrupted me at every sentence--a thing we have carefully trained
each other not to do.

"Has it a garden?" she asked, suddenly, stopping in front of me
with a compelling wave of her wand, or feather brush. "Are you
sure it has a garden?"

"More or less," I said. "Don't chatter, there's an angel."

"And out-houses?" after a pause and an interval of fluffy energy. 
"Of sorts," I said; "but don't talk, my dearest child. You lost me an
epigram then."

"I am so sorry--but--since you are interrupted--dear, dearer, dearest
Len, tell me in six words, what is the Red House like?"

"It's not red at all--at least only one wing of it. It's a big yellow
house--stands all alone in fields. Has a great alarm-bell and, I
believe, a ghost. Now be quiet or I shall slap you. To-morrow we'll
see it."

But the interruption ruined a delightful sentence, conceived in a
spirit of the most delicate irony, and dealing with the late
deplorable action of the London water companies--and again I
experienced that premonition of unrest. Never again, I felt certain,
should I be able to be sure of a clear morning's work. I made
allowances for my wife. I was not, I feel certain, unjust or
unreasonable, but I saw that while the house and the money were
new topics, she could not be expected to preserve on them the
hours of silence which my writing exacted. And by the time the
topics were stale, the beautiful habit of letting each other alone
during working-hours would have been broken forever. I laid down
my fountain-pen to make these reflections. I heard Chloe pulling
out drawers and opening cupboards in our room overhead. Yet
before I could snatch  up my pen she had whirled in and caught me
idle.

"Oh, you're not doing anything. Then I sha'n't interrupt you if I just
ask whether there's a hen-house."

"I don't know," I said, beginning to write very fast, and not
sufficiently grateful, I fear, for her indifference to the money as
compared with the house. "Why don't you settle down to your
work? This is the beginning of the ruin I foresaw."

"I--I don't think I'll work to-day," she said, guiltily. "I'm looking
over some things. But I won't bother."

But she was back again in less than half an hour with a question
about larders burning on her lips, and my article degenerated from
the clear, sustained logical argument which it meant to be, to a
piece of patch-work--of patch-work ill fitted. I became desperate,
and avenged my poor broken article by telling Chloe anything
rather than the truth about my uncle's old house. In the end this
disingenuousness was paid for to the uttermost. If I had prepared
her, if I had had the intelligence to overpaint, even, the charms of
that old house--but I was firm, firm to the point of spitefulness. "A
yellow brick house, as ugly as a lunatic asylum, standing alone in
the fields,  bearing an alarm-bell and a ghostly reputation." This
was the most she got out of me.

My piece of patch-work got its last stitches put in sooner than I
expected. I put it in its envelope, addressed it, and went up to our
room.

All the wardrobe drawers were pulled out. Chloe was sitting on the
floor amid a heap of stuffs--a roll of chintz which her mother had
given her for covers to our drawing-room furniture, if ever we had
any; some bits of velvet, soft reds and greens, that we had bought
together at Liberty's sale; and she was snipping and tearing at a
muslin and lace gown--a gown I had always admired. I remember
she wore it to breakfast the day after our wedding. I felt as though
my tenderest memories were being unpicked, stitch by stitch.

"What on earth--" I said. She looked up with a flush of excitement
on her little face.

"Oh, Len, look here. Don't you think these velvets would cover
some cushions very nicely? And the chintz would make lovely
long curtains, and I thought I could get at least four short blinds
out of this muslin for the new house."

My blood actually ran cold. I sat down suddenly on the
clothes-basket. Chloe was not too preoccupied to tell me not to, for
perhaps the twentieth time. 
"You know it won't bear your weight," she said. "Look here. I shall
put the lace like that, and like that, and tie it back with yellow
ribbon. I've got a soft sash here."

She got up, scattering muslin and velvet, and began to turn over a
corner drawer. I found a trembling tongue.

"But, my dear child, we can't live in the house."

She dropped a lace scarf and her best ivory prayer-book to look at
me.

"But why?"

"It's too big. We can't afford it."

"But we pay rent for this--and we shouldn't for that."

"It's impossible. Why, of course we must let it. It ought to bring us
in a couple of hundred a year."

Chloe's eyes actually filled with tears.

"My dear, my dear," I said, "this is very terrible. Is it possible that
after so short a time I find you longing to leave the Bandbox--our
own little Bandbox--the pride and joy of our hearts?"

She came to me then and asked me not to be so horrid.

"Don't tease," she said, "just when I was so pleased, too! You don't
know how I hate the people next door, Len. Oh, fancy having no
one next door! I'd live in a barn on those terms." 
I talked to her in a thoroughly reasonable way, and she presently
promised that she also would be reasonable. She agreed that we
must let the house. Also she insisted that as I had finished my
work, we should go at once and look at it. I in my turn agreed. It
was while I was lacing my boots that she said, sighing:

"Well, it is hard. But you say it's absolutely hideous--that's one
comfort."

Even then I might have put up an arm to ward off the blow fate
was aiming at me, but my bootlace was in a hard knot, and I said
nothing on any other subject.

In the hour when afternoon ends and evening begins, we set out to
see the Red House. We rode our bicycles, of course. Poor as we
were, we could yet command, on the hire system, machines which,
at any rate, in their first youth, might have been the desire of
princes. Once we had passed the dusty avenue of little villas
(wherein our Bandbox, the corner house, squeezed in between two
more portly brethren, is of all the most unworthy), and had done
the three miles of respectable semi-detachedness which form on
this side of town the outer fringe of London's loathly suburbs, our
way lay through green lanes where hawthorns were budding in
pink and pearl. And here I received a final note of warning. 
"Oh, Len," Chloe sighed, reining in her shining steed to gaze
wistfully on the trim green of the scattered suburban pleasaunces,
"if we could only live out here--away from the washing and the
organ-grinders and the people next door! Oh--I know we can't--but
I wish we could."

"I wish so, too," I said, briskly. It was merely a polite acquiescence
in her aspiration, but it was noted. I, blind mole, noted nothing.
The most explicit warnings pass us by unheeded; it is only after the
doom stroke has fallen that we perceive the significance of
portents.

We climbed the hill and passed through the long, sunny village
street, clamorous now with bean-feasters and superior private
pleasure parties in wagonettes drawn up in front of the "Spotted
Dog" and "The Chequers" and the "Castle Hotel," for was it not
Saturday, and the village but a bare ten miles from Charing Cross?
Then came the sharp turn to the left, the delicious downward rush
through hawthorn-scented air, the black bar of shadow from the
railway bridge, a red cottage, a red wall, tall chestnut-trees,
pyramids of green fan-leaves and miraculous-scented flowers--a
green gate.

"This is it," I said, and Chloe brought down the brake in that
reckless way of hers, and sprang to the ground. The sun-blistered,
old, green gate  swung long and wide on loud, red, rusty hinges as
we led our beasts in. We left them under the biggest of the
chestnut-trees, and walked up the wide, moss-grown drive to
where the front door, fortified by heavy stone pillars, seemed to
defy us, the besiegers.

"Is this really it?" asked Chloe, in a whisper. And well might she
ask. The yellow brick on which in my talk I had laid so much
stress was hidden almost--at any rate transformed, transfigured--by
a net-work of great leaves and red buds; creepers covered it--all
but. And at the side there were jasmine that in July nights would
be starry and scented, and wistaria, purple-flowered and
yellow-leaved over its thick, gnarled boughs, and ivy; and at the
back, where the shaky green veranda is overhung by the perilous
charm of the white balcony, Virginia-creepers and climbing roses
grew in a thorny maze. The moat was there, girdling the old
lawns--where once the Elizabethan manor stood--with a belt of
silver, a sad swan and a leaky boat keeping each other company.
Yellow laburnums trailed their long hair in the water, and sweet
lilac-bushes swayed to look at their pretty plumes reflected in it.
To right and left stretched the green tangled mysteries of the
overgrown gardens.

We stepped back onto the bridge that crosses  the moat, and
looked up at the tall house. Before the ivy dressed it, it must have
been very ugly. I suspect my uncle of having had that ivy clipped
to its last leaf every spring; and he must have had the house
scraped and "pointed" pretty often. How otherwise account for the
yellow brick hideousness that glared at me through the mist of the
years lying between me and my childhood?

The Red House is square, and very tall, but it has two large, low,
long wings ending in four square brick turrets with pointed roofs.
We stood and looked at it, and I said,

"You see it's much too big for us to live in--"

Chloe assented, feverishly: "Oh yes, of course, ever so much. But
can't we get in?"

We couldn't, because I had forgotten to call at the plumber's in the
village for the key.

"But I'll go back for it," I said, "only--I didn't think of it--the shop's
sure to be shut. It's Saturday, you know."

"Then we won't waste time," said Chloe, firmly. "Let's be burglars.
Break a pane of glass, and let's get in by a window."

Already she was stooping for a stone.

"Well--if you insist. But let's at least find a window without
shutters."

We went round the house and round the house,  like the snow in
the riddle; but every window had its eyelids down, as Chloe said.

"Stupid, sleepy thing," she said, "we must wake it up. Can't you
climb up to the balcony and get in there?"

"Shutters again," I said. "My worthy uncle believed in them. Now I
come to think of it, he had shutters to every window, and a patent
fastening for each, and all different. But--"

I was looking at the thick, twisted stems of the ivy that clung to the
wall of the low left wing.

"There used to be an apple-room with a window opening on the
leads. In happier days--"

"Happier?"

"No--earlier! I have climbed up the ivy in my time. But I dare say
the apple-room is locked. But I'll go and see, if you insist upon it."

Chloe measured the height with her eyes, some ten feet.

"Very well," she said, meekly. And I went up the ivy. It was as
easy as going up a ladder; but I own that as I stepped onto the leads
I did not expect to hear my wife's voice just below my feet, saying,

"Look out--you'll kick me."

She had climbed up the ivy behind me. I said nothing till I had
pulled her up to stand safely beside me, and then I fairly shook her. 
"You wicked," I said. "Suppose you had slipped? You might have
broken that little, silly neck of yours."

She laughed.

"My dear boy, I was climbing trees when you were in your cradle!"

As I was out of my cradle twenty-two years ago, and that was three
years before she was even in hers, this insult called for no reply.

"Did you really think I should allow you to see an inch of even the
apple-room without me?" she said. "Come on--oh!--how jolly the
garden looks from here! Is this the window?"

It was. I broke one of the cobwebby panes, and opened the
window, but, of course, it was barred.

"Idiot that I am--I remember now--I used to creep through. I've
grown since then. It's no good. We must give it up."

Chloe was looking at the bars. Suddenly she took her hat off.

"I'm not so very big," she said. "You called me a shrimp only
yesterday."

The bottom of the window was level with the leads. She twisted
her skirt round her ankles as she sat down, and pushed both feet
between the bars.

"You can hold on to my arm if you like till I feel the floor. Oh,
don't be silly. I must."

  
She twisted herself like an eel through the bars.

"Right. Let go," and the next moment she was laughing at me out
of the dark window.

"Mind the stairs," I said.--"Open the door at the top, and I can
come in, too."

She disappeared. The little door shook to her withdrawal of the
rust-locked bolts. I bent my head and stepped in. A kiss met my
face in the dark.

"Welcome to your house," she said.

We went down the little, dark, rickety staircase. At the bottom was
a door. Locked.

"Oh, this is too much!" said Chloe.

"Go back a few steps," I said, for my blood was up now, and,
besides, the door did not feel very firm.

"Broad shoulders are useful sometimes," she said, when the door
had given way to the pressure of mine, and we found ourselves
standing in the great, dark kitchen, where the thin, dusty shafts of
yellow sunlight shot through the shuttercracks.

We had down those shutters, and looked out through the dingy
windows on the moat.

"Oh, Len, what a place!" she said, and kissed me again. "Just look
at the roasting-jack, and the rack for guns, and the hooks in the
roof to  hang hams and things--and, oh--there's a great bacon-rack.
It is too beautiful!"

We explored the pantry and the servants' hall, the little bedrooms
above, and then along the flagged passage to the great hall, tiled
with white and red marble, with the oak staircase winding up out
of it.

We explored the living-rooms that led from it, and before we had
climbed the first flight of stairs to the great drawing-room, my
wife was breathless with enthusiasm. She kissed me in every
room--"for luck," as she explained--and when at last even the great
attics held nothing concealed from us, I calculated that I had
received twenty-nine kisses.

"It ought to let for a good bit," I said, thoughtfully, when at last I
had replaced all the shutters, and had persuaded her to come out
and let me bang the big door after us.

"It'll want some doing up, won't it?" said Chloe. "That's a very
dangerous hole in the staircase. Come, let's go round the garden."

We went. The old garden had always been beautiful to me, even in
the days when I used secretly to eat gooseberries there, and plums,
and peaches in an unripe state; and it was beautiful now, even as I
remembered it, only now its trees and bushes were incredibly
grown--moss-  cushioned its paths. Its fountains were dry and weed
grown, and its sun-dial was covered with briony and woody
nightshade. I put aside the green trails to show Chloe the motto,
Horas numero nisi serenas ("I chronicle only the sunny hours").

She leaned her elbows on the top of the sundial, and looked at me.

"There now, you see," she said. "We must live here! We simply
must. Only sunny hours!"

"My dear, it's madness. We can't live here. We can let it for two
hundred pounds a year."

"I don't care if we could let it for two thousand," said she.

"And our furniture would about fill the servants' hall and the
kitchen."

"Then we'll live in the servants' hall and the kitchen."

"And we could never keep up the garden. It would take three men
all their time."

"It wouldn't. And I'd get up at three in the morning and weed."

"But you promised to be reasonable."

"I am; it's you who aren't; and if I did I don't care. It's what I've
wanted all my life. Oh, Len, you must."

"If you're so keen on the place we might live  in one of the
cottages." There were four on the estate.

"I hate the cottages. Poky little things."

"They're bigger than the Bandbox," I said.

"I hate the Bandbox," she said, mutinously. Then I laughed.

"After that heresy," I said, "I shall take you home. My darling
lunatic, come away. The Red House has turned your brain."

Chloe mounted in silence, and in silence we rode away. In the
village I stopped at the plumber's--he is also a builder and a house
agent, and though it was Saturday, he was, after all, at home--and
rather hurriedly told him to try and let the Red House.

Chloe said nothing, but stood beside me pale with the strain of her
inward protest.

We rode on.

"How could you?" she said, presently. "When shall we ever have
such a chance again? That glorious green garden, and the orchard,
all pinky and white, and the drawing-room--it must be forty feet
long--and the cottages, and the still-room, and the dear, darling,
little apple-room. The whole place is like a picture out of Silas
Marner. I'm sure that long, low room where you have to go down
two steps was called the white parlor. It's like all the houses I've
ever  dreamed of. And after I've kissed you in every room for luck,
too, and everything! Oh, Len, you don't really love me, or you'd let
me live there!"

"You certainly put a great strain on my love, madam," I said,
"when you cry for the moon in this disgraceful manner on the
king's high-road. Cheer up! Perhaps you'll feel saner in the
morning. If not, we'll send for the doctor."

"Well, you'll never let it," she said, riding faster and faster in her
indignation. "That's one comfort! If you do, I shall never believe in
anything again. It's the most beautiful place in the world--and it's
ours--our very own. You'll see; no one will dare to take it."

What spells she worked I don't know, nor how she worked them.
But, curiously enough, no one did take the house. City gentleman
after city gentleman approached and retreated after a parley, that
always ended in suggestions for repairs to the tune of from four to
five hundred pounds. At first each new applicant was to me an
object of interest, and to Chloe an object of jealous detestation.
But as time wore on, and each new candidate told the same
unflattering tale of the shocking state of repairs at the Red House,
the hour came when at the accustomed formula I merely smiled.
But Chloe laughed, a laugh of triumph and delight. 
We used to ride over there every day to see if the house was let,
and it never was; and more and more flowers came out in the
garden--old, small sweet tulips and forget-me-nots and hearts-ease,
and the roses were in tiny bud.

And never for a day did Chloe cease to cry for the moon.

The 27th of May is her birthday. It is also the anniversary of the
day on which I first met her. So that when, on that day, she held
her hand up to look at her new turquoises, and said, "It is a lovely
ring, and you're a dear, reckless, extravagant millionaire, and I love
you; but oh, Len, I wish you'd give me the Red House instead"--I
could hold out no longer.

"Very well," I said, "you shall have the moon, since you won't give
up crying for it. But don't blame me if you find it's only green
cheese, after all."

"Oh, you darling!" she cried. "But I knew all the time you
would--if I only kept on--"

"This revelation of your methods of government--" I began, with
proper severity.

But she stopped my mouth quite irresistibly.

"Now, don't growl when I'm so happy," she said. "We shall never
have any horrid rent to pay again. We are just being economical,
that's all. We can't afford to keep a great house eat-  ing its head
off in the stable; and, anyway, we sha'n't dun ourselves for repairs."

"There will be rates," I said.

"And roses," said she.

"And the expense of moving."

"And the economy of moving."

"And we can't afford a gardener."

"And we don't want one."

"And we've got no furniture."

"Yes, we have; a whole Bandbox full."

"And there's a ghost."

"We sha'n't see it--"

"And if you do?"

"I'll train it to run on errands and clean the windows."

"No servant will stay with us."

"They won't as it is."

"There's a condition," I said.

"Anything on earth," said she.

"If I give you the Red House for a dear little birthday present, I
must insist on being allowed to put my shaving-brush down
anywhere in it; just anywhere I choose."

"You shall. There's room enough," she said, but even at that
moment she sighed.

"When do you wish to move in?"

"On your birthday, of course."

And so it was decided. The blow I had dreaded  had fallen. My
own hands had guided it. On the 6th of June we were to take
possession of an immense mansion, standing in its own grounds,
replete with every possible inconvenience. Chloe dropped her
work and sewed curtains all day. I had never known her so happy.
And indeed, now that the die was cast, I myself felt that our new
experiment had in it at least all the elements of interest. I owned as
much.

"Ah," said Chloe, "I knew you hid a kindly heart under that mask
of indifference. Interesting? Oh, my dear boy, you haven't the
faintest idea of the interesting things that are going to happen to us
at the Red House."

Nor had she. Had either of us even faintly imagined a tenth part of
what was to befall us in that house-- And yet I don't know. Chloe
says now that she would have left the safe shelter of the Bandbox
just the same. And I--well, as you see, if Chloe only "keeps all on,"
I am foolish enough for anything.

CHAPTER II IN THE RED HOUSE

"YOU look like a historical picture," Chloe said. "What's-his-name
weeping over the ruins of Somewhere or other."

"I am weeping, over the ruins of my happy home," I replied, as I
sat on a packing-case and stirred with my boot-toe a tangle of
brown paper, string, dust, and empty bottles on the dining-room
floor.

"Nonsense!" she said. "Your happy home's where I am, isn't it?"

"That's just what I say. This adorable Bandbox of ours contained
my heart's one treasure, and therefore--"

"If you mean me," she said, briskly, "your treasure is not going to
be kept in a Bandbox any longer. It is going to live in a palace--"

"Unfurnished--replete with--"

"Historic associations and other delights," she interrupted. "And
not quite unfurnished, either.  Poor, dear boy--was it unhappy at
the nasty flitting, then? And was it like a cat, and did it hate to
leave its own house? It shall have its paws buttered--its boots, I
mean--the minute we get into the new house!"

She came and sat beside me on the packing-case, and I absently
put my arm round her.

"Allow me a moment for natural regrets," I said. "It is not fair to
distract my mind with undue influence when I'm watching the dark
waters of time close over the wreck of that good ship, the
Bandbox."

"That's fine writing," she said, contemptuously. "Talk sensibly,
there's a good boy."

Acquiescing, I pinched her ears softly. What my wife terms
sensible conversation is unworthy to be reported.

The Bandbox lay before us, so to speak, in little bits. All the
curtains were down, and all the pictures. The crockery was packed
up, so were the wedding-presents. The saucepans and kettles sat in
a forlorn group on the sitting-room floor. Our comfortable beds
were now nothing but rolls of striped ticking and long, iron
bands--lying about where one could best trip over them. The
wall-papers, which had looked so bright and pleasant with our
books and pictures on them, now showed, in patches of
aggressively unfaded  color, the outlines of the shelves and frames
that had hung against them. The fire that had boiled our
breakfast-kettle had gone out, and the cold ashes looked
inexpressibly desolate.

As we sat awaiting the arrival of our green-grocer, who had
undertaken to "move" us, I pointed out the ashes to Chloe.

"I believe you would like to put some on your head," said she.

The green-grocer had promised to come at nine o'clock. That was
why we had got up in the middle of the night, and finished our
packing before eight o'clock. It was now past ten.

"He has thought better of it," said I. "He is a far-seeing man, and a
kindly. He knows it cannot be for our real good to leave our
Bandbox. Let's set to work and put all the things back in their
places!"

"Here he is," said Chloe, jumping off the packing-case at the
squeaking sound which ever preludes any weak effort on the part
of the Bandbox door-knocker. "Oh, Len," she whispered, in
awestruck tones, "it isn't the men! I can see through the door-glass,
and it's a lady, and look at me!"

"Life hardly offers a dearer pleasure!" said I, and indeed, in her
white gown and blue pinafore, with her brown hair loose and
ruffled, she made so pretty a picture that I could not help thinking 
how a really high-toned green-grocer might well have refused base
coin as the price of "moving" us, counting himself well paid by the
sight of her.

"I'll go, if you like," I said, and went. Chloe hid herself behind the
kitchen door, where the jack-towel used to hang. Even its roller
had been unscrewed and packed now.

"Chloe!" I called, "it's all right. It's only Yolande."

"Only, indeed!" Miss Riseborough echoed. "Oh, here you are!
What on earth's all this? A spring cleaning?"

"Yolande?" Chloe cried. "But I thought you were in Italy!"

"So I am. At least I was last week, and shall be again next. I've just
run over for a few days on business, and I slipped away to the
Bandbox to rest my eyes with a look at the turtle-doves. But they
don't look restful at all."

She was taking the long, pearl-headed pins out of her hat as she
spoke.

"Oh!" said my wife, again. "Sit down--no--not on that--it's crocks
and newspapers--and the chairs are all packed. Try the
packing-case."

But murmuring, "The divan for me!" Yolande sank down on a roll
of bedding.

"I've yards to tell you, only I thought you  were in that horrid Italy,
and I've been too busy to write. We're moving into a house with
twenty-nine rooms in it."

Then the whole story came out--of Chloe's folly and of my
madness. Yolande listened intently, her bright, gray eyes taking in
Chloe's transports, and my all too moderate enthusiasm, as well as
the devastated state of the Bandbox.

"You poor, dear things," she said. "I wish I wasn't going back to
Italy to-morrow. I should like to lend a hand."

"I know you would," said I, with intent.

"Oh yes, but you can't wound me with your sneers. I own I love to
have a finger in my neighbors' pies, and the more I love my
neighbor, the more I long to infest her house on baking-days. But
look here, I wish you'd do me a good turn. If your house is that
awful size, you will certainly have a couple of spare rooms in it."

"More like five-and-twenty," I said.

"Well, I've let my flat, unfurnished. Could you, would you, can
you, will you be angels enough to take in my poor, homeless
furniture, and give it board and lodging and the comforts of a
home for a month or two?"

Of course we would, gladly, and we said so. And then we
talked--always of the Red House.

"You'll have a good deal of fun for your money  in your new
house," Yolande said, at last, "but, oh, you make me feel as if you
were the Babes in the Wood and I were the wicked uncle. I do
wish I could stay and help you, but I've three pupils waiting in
Florence with their mouths wide open, and a mere temporary
chaperon guarding them, and I must scurry back to fill those
gaping beaks with fat plums of learning. It's a dreadful trade, a
crammer's--almost as bad as the samphire-gatherers'."

"Wish the pie luck, anyhow," said I, drawing the cork of the
ginger-ale, "though you can't have your fingers in it this time. But I
dare say there'll be a bit of cold pie left for you when you come
back." So we stood up solemnly and raised our glasses to my toast,

"Here's luck to the Red House!"

Then said Yolande,

"And to the Babes in the Wood!"

And to Chloe's toast, "Here's to the wicked uncle--I mean the fairy
godmother," we emptied the glasses.

Then Yolande said good-bye, and pinned her hat on to her bright
hair. At the door she turned to say:

"By-the-way, you won't mind my asking you to keep my things
aired, will you? The furniture-warehouse people always let them 
get mothy, and give the piano a cold in its head. You might hang
up the pictures, if you don't mind the trouble; they've all got cords,
and they keep better hung up, like meat or game, you know. And
furniture keeps best when it's being used. You'll sit on my chairs
now and then, for the sake of the absent, won't you? My settle
would go awfully well with your gate-table, and my oak press
would do in those 'marble halls' you were talking about. I must
rush, or miss my train. Good-bye. I'll send the furniture down
to-morrow."

And she was gone.

Chloe turned to me with wide-open, sparkling eyes.

"Oh, Len, isn't she a darling? Just because she saw how our
Bandboxful of furniture would rattle about in that big house like a
peanut in a cocoanut shell, to lend us all hers! She is a darling."

"She is," I admitted, "and her hair is the real Venetian red. But
you'll miss the furniture horribly when she takes it away."

"Don't grumble," said Chloe. "We shall have all her lovely things
for months and months, and by the time she comes back we shall
have made some money to buy things. I'm going to work like a
nigger directly we get settled.  And so must you. Oh, here are the
men at last. Two hours late!"

"Perhaps it is as well," I said. "Harriet is only just ready."

Our fat-faced maid-servant, who had rigidly refused during the
whole morning to assist us in the least, on the ground that she "had
her packing to see to," now descended the stairs, bearing her whole
wardrobe in two brown-paper parcels and a tin hat-box.

"Come in, please," said Chloe, to our remover. "You'd better take
these oak boxes first. They're very heavy."

"I wants chesties of drawerses," said the man, hoarsely, "all the
chesties of drawerses you've got, and the pianner. Come on, Bill."

"Right you are, Charley," was the response.

"We haven't a piano, here," said Chloe, and Charley seemed at
once to form the lowest opinion of us. He was a thick-set ruffian
with a red and angry eye. He was one of the four helpers engaged
by the green-grocer to "move" us. His clothes and those of his
friends smelled strange and stuffy, as though they had been
smeared with putty and mutton fat, and locked away for years in a
cupboard full of pickled onions and yellow soap and mice. The
clothes of the unskilled laborer always have this strange  scent. It
lingers about everything they touch in passing through a house, and
after days its freshness is still unimpaired. But I never knew any
scent so overpowering as that which clung to the clothes of
Charley and his mates. They strayed loudly up the uncarpeted
stairs, urgent in their insistence on "chesties of drawerses," and
Chloe would have followed them, but Harriet came forward with,
"Please, 'm, could I speak to you for a moment?"

"Well?"

"Please, I should wish to leave at the end of my month. Mother
says the place ain't fit for me. The 'ouse is too large and the work is
too 'eavy."

"But we're going into another house," said Chloe, cheerfully.

"Mother don't 'old with movings," resumed Harriet, "and she says
the 'ouse is too large and the work too 'eavy."

"Very well; you can go into the kitchen and wait till we're ready to
start," said Chloe, with dignity.

But when the fat-faced traitress had stumped away down the little
passage, Chloe dragged me into the dismantled dining-room and
flung her arms round my neck. This was not, I knew, affection. It
was merely despair. 
"She's a pig," said my wife, with tears in her voice. "Her month's
up in a week. She might have told us before. And I'm sure we've
been kind to her. I gave her that green moreen petticoat, and some
stockings and collars and things, only yesterday. And the petticoat
was as good as new."

"I'll have satisfaction for that outrage, at any rate. A moreen
petticoat--and green, too!" I cried. "She must be a stranger to all
the higher emotions of our fallen nature. Cheer up, my darling,
we'll get another girl right enough--a better one."

"We couldn't have a worse," said she. "Oh, they've broken
something. I heard it smash. I do hope it's not the Dresden vases."

It was only our best looking-glass, the same in which I had
rebelliously dared to shave. "Never mind," I said. "They'll have to
replace it, and Charley will be unlucky for seven years. That's one
comfort."

It was almost our only one. Reckless as a herd of pigs in
mid-flight, yet slow as an army of lame snails, Charley and his
confederates packed our Bandboxful of furniture into the dark van
that smelled of matting and straw and quarter-day. They broke an
"occasional" table, and the door of the corner cupboard, and  they
smashed on the door-step the great jar of pickled walnuts which
my mother-in-law had told me would last us a year. But it was
Harriet who, sulkily obeying my order to make herself useful, went
to the top of the house to fetch two highly colored texts from the
walls of her bed-room, and, returning, fell over the best toilet set,
smashing the jug and the soap-dish lid! It was rather a nice set, too,
dark green, that Yolande had brought from Italy, and, by us, here,
totally irreplaceable. I sent Harriet into the back kitchen then.

"And don't you come out till we're ready to start," I said.

When the last of our "sticks" had been dragged from the house,
and the van had been half unpacked to recover my coat and hat,
zealously hidden under the dining-room table in the van's centre,
and when the forlorn party of chairs and bookcases had been
removed from the pavement and once more envanned, we added
Harriet, speechless with sulky displeasure, to the van-load; and as
we watched them drive off, my heart, at least, was lighter.

We set up our bicycles ready, and blew up the tires. Then we went
all over the little house, "to say good-bye to it," my wife said. Her
face was quite sad now. It was in that horrid little  dressing-room
that she slipped her hand into mine and said:

"I didn't think I should be sorry. But I am. Dear little
Bandbox--we've been very happy here, haven't we? Oh, do say you
think we shall be just as happy there. You do, don't you?"

A narrator cannot be expected to chronicle all his replies. My
answer satisfied Chloe, anyhow, and she consented to dry her eyes
on my handkerchief.

Then we took a last look round, and went out.

"Good-bye," we said to our Bandbox, and wished it a happy future.

"I hope the next people who live in you will be kind to you," said
Chloe, "and keep you clean, and be very happy in you, poor, dear
little house."

We rode away, turning at the corner for one more last look at our
Bandbox. Its bare windows blinked forlornly at us in the June
sunlight like the eyes of a deserted orphan. We rode on in silence.

We passed our furniture about half a mile from the Bandbox. And
we had been keeping our tempers for more than two hours in the
spacious emptiness of the Red House before the rattle of harness
and the scent of Charley's coat announced the arrival of the van. 
Charley and his minions made a hollow pretence of putting the
furniture in its place. They did put the bedsteads together,
insecurely, and in the wrong rooms; and they set up "chesties of
drawerses" against walls. The oak chests they carried to the attic,
and the best steel fire-irons were discovered, weeks later, in the
cellar. But almost everything--saucepans, crockery, coal-scuttles,
books, hearth-rugs, stair-rods, fenders--was dumped on the floors
of the hall, the kitchen, and the dining-room. I remember that I had
to move half a ton of mixed valuables to find the tea-kettle, when,
after two hours of breathless energy, we heard the van's retreating
wheels, and were moved towards the kitchen by one common
longing--for tea.

Chloe got the tea, and I cleared it away. Harriet reluctantly
consented to wash up the tea-things.

"But," she added, and it really was like a blow in the wind, "I must
get away before dark. No, it ain't no manner of use talking. There's
ghosts in this 'ouse, and I wouldn't sleep under this 'ere roof, not
for any wages you could offer."

In vain we besought her to reconsider this decision.

"Mother always said to me, 'Don't you never lay your 'ead on your
pillow in a 'ouse where  there's ghosts, or you'll see 'em walk--safe
as eggs. It runs in our family,' says she; 'my mother's second cousin
see a calf without a 'ead walkin' on the church-yard wall, as plain
as the nose on your face,' says she. And I can't go agin my own
mother, so if it's convenient to you, sir, I'll leave as soon as I've
dried the tea-things."

"If it's convenient!" said Chloe. And then we both began to laugh.
That saved the situation, besides making Harriet uncomfortable.
We let her go, because we could not help it, and we set out our
supper--it was tinned salmon and bread--on a sheet of newspaper,
because we couldn't find any table-cloths.

And we washed our hands with mottled soap, because the brown
Windsor soap had hidden itself away somewhere. And we dried
them on Chloe's apron, because the towels were mislaid. And we
made some cocoa, because the ginger-ale could not, at the
moment, be found. It never was found, by-the-way. The search for
lamps being fruitless, we walked together to the village in the cool,
pale evening, and, returning with a pound of candles in a blue
paper, it seemed natural to wander round the shadowy gardens,
slowly wrapping themselves in the blue veil of the summer night.
The stars came out, one by one, and  a little moon that had been
like a cloudy ghost through the gold of the afternoon seemed to
wash her face with liquid light, and set to work shining in bright
earnest. The house seemed very chill, very dark, very silent, as we
let ourselves in. The most energetic search and half a box of wax
vestas failed to find us a single candlestick. How we regretted,
then, the empty bottles left behind at the Bandbox!

At last we set up our candles by melting the ends and sticking
them in tea-saucers. Then I broke up a packing-case and made a
fire in our room. By a fortunate accident, Chloe, looking for her
brush and comb, found the blankets. We went round the house and
closed all the shutters.

"Now," said Chloe, cheerfully, "we really are at home."

I looked round on the unspeakable confusion--the whole
Bandboxful of our effects emptied out, as it were, "tumbled out of
a sack" upon the floor, and I said,

"Yes."

The birds woke us in the morning; such an orchestra as I had never
even imagined. Sleep seemed fled forever. It was I who went down
to light the fire for breakfast. It was good to fling back the shutters
and window-sashes, and to  lean out through the drifted net of
green jasmine leaves and taste the fresh sweets of the morning.

Presently Chloe came and leaned beside me. The whole world
seemed blue and green and gold; the trees and the grass sparkling
in the dewy sunshine, and on the bright turf the long, black, tree
shadows.

"I never saw shadows like these," Chloe breathed; "they're quite
different to the evening ones. And there's no one next door! Oh, it
is very good!" The birds sang, the sun shone softly, the swan in the
moat spread wide wings, preening his white feathers. A purple
haze covered the hills. It was indeed "very good." The wood began
to crackle. I looked at my watch. Five o'clock.

"We must always get up at half-past four," Chloe said. "I had no
idea anything could be so beautiful. Think of the poor silly people
who only get up at eight."

I thought of them, and I knew that very soon we should once more
be numbered among that pitiable band.

But I said nothing. We cleared away the breakfast and made our
room tidy, and every now and then she would stop to clap her
hands--once there were two flat-irons and a duster in them--and to
say: 
"Oh, isn't it perfect? Isn't it amusing and interesting and thrilling,
and everything anything can possibly be?"

We arranged a scheme of disentanglement, and applied it to our
goods. Chloe dived into the mass and came up with treasures,
which under her directions I bore to the situations she indicated.
But many things seemed homeless, and the command, "Oh, I don't
know--anywhere--on the kitchen-table," grew so frequent that the
kitchen-table groaned beneath its load, and even the tall dressers
showed signs of repletion.

But we got one room clear--the white parlor, Chloe called it. It was
really half panelled in oak--painted, of course, by some vandal
middle-Victorian hand--but still charming, with its carved garlands
and flourishes, its high mantelpiece and odd corners. We swept it;
we put down our best carpet and hearth-rug; we brought in our oak
gate-table and our polished beechwood chairs with the rush seats,
and the corner cupboard, and the little bow-legged oak sideboard;
we put some green Flemish pots on the mantel-piece. Chloe ran
out and came back with half a dozen late tulips, and when she had
set them on the table in a jar of Chinese willow-pattern
(hand-work, none of your transfers), why, then we had a "room
ready," a refuge, as Chloe said.  We also carted the remaining
chaos into the kitchen.

"Because I give that up," she said; "we can't get that clear for
ages." So pictures and curtains, and all the things that take time to
their fixing, were carried away. And the swept hall looked large
and beautiful, especially when we had cleaned the red and white of
the marble inlaid floor with a wet broom and a pail of water.

As I rubbed the broom vigorously over a discolored square of the
marble, I was suddenly conscious of a guilty feeling. Analyzed, the
sensation frightened me. I was becoming interested in these
details. And I had not once thought about my work, though
to-morrow was the day for my article in the Weekly Wilderness. It
had never even entered my head to dream that I could ever be
interested in cleaning a floor. Yet here I was calling joyously to
Chloe, deep in a packing-case in the kitchen:

"It's coming the same color as the other."

"It won't be when it's dry," she said, "but I've found the corkscrew
and the lamps. One of them is wrong way up and full of paraffine.
At least it was. It's anywhere you like now."

I carried my pail and broom into the kitchen.

"My dear," I said, "have you found my shaving-brush?" 
"Why?" she asked. "Do you want to put it down on the parlor
mantel-piece?"

The very thought appalled me, and the fact that it did so appalled
me still more deeply.

I pointed out that a shaving-brush is useful for other purposes than
for putting down on things, and presently we found it involved in a
pair of lace curtains.

We had lunch in the garden.

And then Yolande's furniture suddenly loomed at our gates. We
had wholly forgotten it. The white parlor had to be reorganized to
accommodate her oak settle. The piano we boldly ordered into the
drawing-room, where it lived out long days of lonely grandeur. Her
furniture was really charming--Chippendale chairs and a Sheraton
bureau, pictures by the dozen and lovely crocks by the score. The
men who moved her things had linen jackets, and they were not
scented like Charley. They actually put things where we wanted
them. We stood by in humble amazement. But when they asked
where they should hang the pictures, we looked at each other,
almost speechless with wonder and gratitude. They hung the
pictures, they asked for a broom, and, if ours had not been wet,
they would have swept up the dust their careful feet had not been
able to help bringing in. They dusted the furni-  ture, and asked if
there was anything else they could do. I said there was not, and felt
in my pocket for silver, far more than I could afford. But Chloe
said:

"Oh yes! How kind of you! Do please ask every one you know if
they know of a servant. We haven't one, and you see--"

They saw. They promised all things; they took my silver and went.

And that very evening a trim young woman came "about the
situation," accepted it, went off to fetch her box, and never
returned. Perhaps she saw the ghost as she went out. We never
knew.

Next day I sat down with my type-writer in the parlor. Chloe went
to London to ransack the registry-offices, so that there was no one
to do house-work. Therefore, when I had done my article--it was
on "The Pleasures of Home," I remember--I tidied the place up a
little. Happening to find the black-leading apparatus in the
bread-pan, I tried my hand at polishing the parlor-grate. It is much
less easy than one would suppose, and I barked my knuckles
against the bars. Then I cleaned some windows. I knew, from
Cranford, that this was done with newspapers. The middles of the
panes were easy, the corners inaccessible and irritating. Then I got 
tea ready and filled the lamps. I experienced all the sensations of
an explorer in an unknown and ravishing country. All this was new
and extraordinarily fascinating. I chopped wood and filled a box
with it, ready for the morning. I also chopped my finger, and
decided that I had done enough house-work for the moment. Then
I remembered my article. I had forgotten to post it, and the post
was gone when I got to the village. I had to walk to Blackheath to
catch the late mail--four miles there and back. When I got home
Chloe was sitting on the door-step with a perfect stranger.

"We've been here hours," she said. "How could you go off like
that? This is Ellen--she is coming to live with us."

I could see in Ellen's eye that she was not so sure of this. When
Ellen saw the kitchen, with its indescribable complications of
domestic matter, she blenched, and I knew the worst. We all
turned to, however, and tidied the kitchen superfically, arranged
Ellen's bedroom, assisted her to prepare supper, went to bed worn
out, and came down in the morning to find Ellen gone. She was
not wholly bad; she had some kind impulses. She had lighted the
fire and put on the kettle before leaving. But we were a little late
that morning, and all the water had boiled  away. When I filled the
kettle at the tap it cracked, and Chloe said it was always the way,
and snatched the kettle out of my hand, and boiled the water for
tea in a saucepan that had had cabbage in it. So, after breakfast, I
insisted on a turn in the quiet, sunny garden, and she grew calmer.

"It is awful, though, isn't it?" she said.

"Yes," I owned, "but I black-leaded the parlor-grate yesterday, and
I did several other things that you never noticed."

She was stricken with remorse. I followed up my advantage.

"And now I'm going to scold us, pussy. It was entirely my fault that
we left the Bandbox, but I hope you'll forgive me, and let's make
the best of it. And we mustn't take things too seriously. What does
it all matter? Through life, my precious pussy-kitten, the best
weapon is laughter. Let us agree to laugh at everything, unless we
have to cry at it, and if we do cry, to cry--like this."

For she was crying--with her head on my shoulder and my arms
round her.

"I'm so tired," she said, presently.

"I know you are. Now we're going to sit down on this dear, old
stone bench under the red may-tree, and, if you're good, I'll tell you 
things. We won't try to get a servant again till the kitchen's straight.
And we'll shut up all the rooms except the kitchen, and we'll move
our bedroom things into one of the down-stairs rooms, so as not to
have to use the stairs at all. And the little room that opens out of
the kitchen we'll put two tables in, and do our work there--for we
must work, you know. And we'll take it in turns to do the
house-work, and the other shall work. And when it's all straight
we'll get a treasure of a maid, and all live happy ever after! Now
you're going to sit here quietly, and I'm going to fetch the Inland
Voyage, and read aloud to you for an hour."

We did all these things, and gradually some sort of order evolved
itself from chaos, and the scent of Charley's coat faded slowly
away.

Then we had a rapid succession of unsuitable servants; five, I
think, were honest, the sixth went off with all Chloe's lace
petticoats and her mink cape.

Then we got a woman from the village to come in by the day. She
worked fairly well, but she carried a covered basket, and it cost us
too much in tea and butter.

All this time we had never had a moment for gardening, and
Chloe's dream of growing our own vegetables was being swiftly
hidden by the  weeds of oblivion. There were flowers in plenty,
though, now. Hundreds of roses, red and white and yellow.
Thousands of pink roses. Canterbury-bells, red daisy-flowers,
lupins, columbines, and giant larkspurs. Chloe kept the house a
flowery bower. I cleaned the boots and the knives, and whistled at
my work. It was when half the neck of mutton got into that
covered basket and, ostrich-like, left its tail sticking out, that I told
Mrs. Coombe that we must part. She asked for no explanation; I
gave none. We parted without unnecessary words. That day it
began to rain--a thunder-storm first, then slow, steady, pelting rain
for hours and hours. We sat over the kitchen fire that evening and
told ghost stories till I saw my wife beginning to cast glances over
her shoulder to where the darker shadows lurked in the corners of
the great, black-raftered kitchen. Then I lit twelve candles, set then
on the mantel-piece, and made port-wine negus, and we drank it
and went to bed.

In the pitch-dark middle of the night, Chloe caught me by the arm.

"You must wake up," she said, in a terrified whisper; "there's some
one in the house--or--or something. I've been awake for hours.
Listen! Can't you hear it?"

I listened. 
"It's like--Oh, Len, I am so frightened It's a sort of dripping,
dripping."

She held me very tight with both hands.

"It's like--it's as if some one had been killed and there was blood
dripping onto the floor. Oh, listen, and do strike a light! I'm afraid
to put my arm out for the matches. It is like blood, dripping!
Listen!"

I listened.

And it was.

CHAPTER III  THE GHOST

I HAD held my breath to listen to the drip, drip--loud in itself and
hollow in its echo through the grisly silence of the middle night.
Now I let my breath go in a sigh.

"It is blood, dripping," said Chloe.

"It can't be," I said; "there's no one in the house to kill any one
else--and no one to be killed, either. Don't be a darling idiot."

"Perhaps it's some one who was killed long ago!" Her teeth
chattered.

"A ghost, you mean?" I said, cheerfully. "Not it! I expect some
tramp's got in and upset a beer-bottle. Let me get my boots and the
poker."

I had always resolved that in no straits would I ever, barefooted,
face a burglar. Think of the horrible advantage of hobnailed
burglar-boots over shrinking, bare toes.

"But there is no poker up here," Chloe said.  "You know we never
could find the bedroom fire-irons. My umbrella; you know--the
one with the purple knob."

One of the ugliest of our wedding presents, the umbrella with the
rock-amethyst handle the size of a fives-ball, stood in the wardrobe
corner. I balanced it in my hand.

"I think it would crack a nut, if need were," said I--"even the most
hardened nut of the most hardened burglar."

"How can you?" said Chloe. She was creeping into her
dressing-gown. "Now, then--I'll carry the light."

"You're not coming with me?"

"Do you think I'm going to stay here alone?"

"But if it is a burglar?"

"Exactly--"

"You mean you're coming to take care of me?"

"Oh, don't," she said--"only I will come."

I blew out the candle and took her hand.

"If we are to surprise any enterprising professional, we sha'n't do it
with a candle," said I. "Now, then--"

We opened the door slowly and softly, and very softly and slowly
crept along the dark passage hand in hand.

At the stair-foot we stood still and listened.  Not a sound but the
drip-drip-dripping. It seemed to come from the white parlor.

My wife clutched my hand in both hers.

"I can't," she whispered, and struck a match. Her hands trembled so
that she could hardly light the candle.

I took it from her.

"You'd better go back," I said. But we went on.

I flung open the door of the white parlor, while Chloe stood with
her back to the wall, hiding her face in her hands.

I took two steps into the darkness. Then I laughed aloud and put
down the candle on the table.

"Len, what is it? Oh--what is it?"

"It's all right, dear," I said, "but it's fortunate I brought the
umbrella."

I put it up as I spoke, and, catching Chloe's hand, drew her under
it. The drops splashed on the umbrella heavily from the ceiling
above. Chloe and I looked in each other's eyes and laughed.

"Oh dear, how silly! Why, it's only the water coming through the
roof!"

"Yes--only!" said I. The floor was an inch deep in water, and from
the ceiling it was falling, in heavy, capricious showers, on
furniture, books, cushions, curtains.
 

 
"You're not frightened now?" I asked, shutting the wet umbrella
with a flap.

"No."

"Then we'd better get dressed and see what can be done."

We dressed hastily and lit the candles in the tall, old brass
candlesticks on the white-parlor mantel-piece. It took us some
little time to find places, where these could stand without prompt
extinguishment from the dripping ceiling.

Then, barefooted both, with my trousers tucked up, and Chloe's
skirts kilted to the knee, we did our best with pails and mops and
house flannels.

We carried all our books out into the hall, and stood them up on
their edges, with their leaves open, to dry. We carried out our
furniture-the settle, and the gate-table, and the rush-bottomed
beechwood chairs. We took down the wet curtains and hung them
on the bacon-rack in the kitchen. "I do wish we kept a pig," said
Chloe, in parenthesis. "Fancy sides of bacon swinging here, instead
of wet, floppy, droppy curtains!" It was a night's work. When the
gray of the dawn showed us, through rain-wrinkled window-panes,
the green tangle of our garden, all beaten down to one dripping
desolation, with a gray sky above, and over all the rain, I looked at
my wife and said: 
"This has been an adventurous night. It is a ghastly morning. Do
people who have been up all night have breakfast? Tea, for
instance? You are wet as any mermaid, and twice as pretty. But
water's not your native element. You must be dried. I'll light a
fire."

She had caught at the rope of bright hair that hung below her
waist, and was wringing the water out of it. Her bare feet were
pink and rosy in the mixed radiance of dawn and candlelight. Her
striped red-and-white skirts gave her a sort of coquettish
smartness, as of a Parisienne at Trouville. She held out her hand
with a dramatic gesture.

"Come with your mermaid," she said; "come and light a fire of
driftwood in her ocean cave."

She led me through the kitchen to the little room where we
worked. A fire burned red and glowing; on her drawing-table,
white damask covered, were bread, butter, tea-things. The brass
kettle sang softly on the hob.

"The ghost must have done this," said I. "You said you'd make it
run errands, but I never thought you'd get it to light fires."

"But I did, you see," said Chloe. "I taught it--little odd minutes
when you were carrying buckets and sticking up damp books on 
their poor tails, so that you shouldn't notice what I was doing. Isn't
it a clever ghost? Aren't I a good teacher?"

"You are an angel," I said. "I'll make the tea."

"Aren't I a noble wife? Aren't you proud of me? Don't you love me
very, very, very?" said she.

"Not exactly," said I, holding her in one arm and making the tea
with the other. "Respect, admiration for your talents--look out, you
nearly had the teapot over!--but love! Don't be exacting--and don't
shake my arm, or I shall scald us both. Go and get something dry
on, and I'll cut some sandwiches."

"And you don't love me?"

"I might like you better if you were dry. Go! Run! Skurry!"

"The potted meat is in the chiffonnier," she said. "Are you going to
keep wet?"

"Yes, I've got to go out and see what there is on the roof, as soon as
it's light enough to see to put up a ladder. Madam, withdraw, and
take five drops of eucalyptus oil on a piece of sugar."

It was rather a pleasant breakfast, though the drip, drip, drip went
on merrily all the time. 
When the last sandwich had vanished Chloe put her elbows on the
table and said:

"Len, I'm afraid it's very wrong, but I've rather enjoyed myself. I
seem to like things to happen. But, oh, what a mess everything is
in!"

"It is," said I, "but I do, too. And it is wicked--a morbid craving for
excitement, even at the expense of a cherished library--the cream
of our country's literature. Now put on your macker, and we'll go
up on the roof."

I helped her into her mackintosh, and we went.

The roof of the white parlor is one of the leaded spaces on the
wings of the Red House. It has a parapet at back and front. These
formed a sort of tank; all the waste-pipes were stuffed up with
leaves and twigs, and I pulled a black, sodden starlings' nest out of
one of them. The rain came down pitilessly. I looked about me. I
knew that, below, the flood in the white parlor must be momently
gaining in depth and intensity.

"Chloe," I said, "this is no time to be tender of bricks and mortar.
Go and fetch the bass-broom, and I will seek for the
coal-hammer."

I found it, after some search, in the pantry. I had taken it there
myself, I remember, in the  avowed belief that it, and it only, could
serve to break into the first gooseberry pie of Chloe's making. I
brought it up onto the roof, and with it smashed away the bricks
and cement till I had a two-foot embrasure in the back parapet.
Then I paused. A moment's silence full of concentrated reflection
broke as I said, "Wife of my heart, to think that quite by accident
you have married a mechanical genius!"

Then we went to find the spade. With it we dug clay from the
banks of one of the little streams which feed our moat. I
transported it in the wheelbarrow, always through the rain, to the
scene of action, and we raised it to the roof by a cord and the
waste-paper basket. With it I built a dam round my embrasure.
Then again I paused in Napoleonic meditation, and then--

"The dust-pan, beloved," I said, looking down on my wife's pink,
rain-wet face.

Then I knocked over the last three inches at the bottom of my
embrasure. The water from within my dam rushed out down the
face of the house--behind the dam lay the tank of water, but my
dam held firm.

"And now a broom-handle, soul of my soul--or, I'll tell you what,
that garden rake we've never used, and some clothes-line."

I spliced the dust-pan's handle at right an-  gles to the handle of the
rake, and laid this last across the embrasure. The parapet held its
ends securely, and the dust-pan, face downward, projected itself
out through the opening. I made all fast with clay and then called
Chloe to come up the step-ladder and share with me the
triumphant moment when my dam should be broken down and my
new dust-pan-cum-rake water-shoot come into play. One's wife
should share one's joys as well as one's sorrows, I said.

The ingenious contrivance, which I thrilled to have found myself
capable of devising, acted perfectly. I kicked my dam to pieces,
and the imprisoned water behind rushed impetuously through the
embrasure, and, directed by the trusty dust-pan, fell in a cataract a
yard and a half from the house, to meander away harmlessly along
the gravel path. I helped the flowing tide with the bass-broom, and
all the while the rain splashed and spun and sputtered on
mackintosh and bared heads. When the leads held but half an inch
of water I strengthened the dust-pan and rake with clay, and we
went indoors.

The white parlor was unspeakably wet--but the water no longer
dripped from the roof.

We mopped again, dried and dressed, and  did our ordinary
house-work. Then the sun came out. We took cushions and rugs
onto the balcony, and fell asleep. We slept till late in the
afternoon. Then I went to fetch a plumber. He came, many days
later, cleared the wastepipes, and sent me in a bill for 2 pounds
17s. 7d. This was the first charge on the legacy we had received
from my uncle.

The second was made by the inspector of the water company. He
compelled us to put in new patent taps all over the house. This cost
7 pounds 9s. 3d.; and when a grand-maternal government came
down on us about the question of sinks and overflow-pipes--Chloe,
in my absence, had the misfortune to cringe before its minion--the
matter ended in a bill of 29 pounds19s. 11d.

Then I said: "Chloe, ruin stares us in the face. When we lived in
the Bandbox--"

"Yes, I know," she interrupted, "but there's such a lot to do here."

"The 'ouse is too large and the work too 'eavy," I quoted.

"It isn't that, but everything's so large," she said. "Why, it takes me
two hours to do the flowers, and they must be done three times a
week at least."

"We must go flowerless, Chloe, or seek the  refuge of the
neighboring workhouse. Now, in the Bandbox--"

"Yes, I know," she said again. "Oh, Len, don't scold--it's horrid of
you!"

Remorselessly I pursued my advantage, for Chloe seemed to be in
a yielding mood.

"In the Bandbox--" I began, but she caught me by the shoulders
and shook me and took the words out of my mouth.

"In the Bandbox," she said, "I worked and you worked. And now
we don't either of us work a bit more than we can help. And I
know why it is, too--we've both found out how interesting other
things are. You'd rather chop wood or clean the boots than write
your nasty, dull articles and stories, and I'd rather put up shelves
and arrange flowers than draw silly pictures of idiotic people for
imbecile magazines. We're both demoralized by--what do you call
it?--the joy of life. I hate work. I wish it was dead!"

"Don't you call sweeping and scrubbing and cooking work?"

She hesitated, then: "No," she cried, defiantly, "it isn't. Work is
what you hate doing, and have to do for your living. Anything else
is play--you know it is!"

"My gentle playfellow, we must work--either  here, in our own Red
House, or in the yellow brick mansion provided by a tender
country for its more obvious failures. The Red House or the
Union--which is it to be?"

"There's Uncle James's two hundred," she said, with a mutinous
glance.

"Chloe, Chloe," I said, "I speak more in sorrow than in anger. In
the Bandbox--yes, I insist on my right to mention that hallowed
spot as often as I choose--you went to town twice a week to wring
remunerative orders for illustrations from the flinty hearts of
editors. You have often explained to me that to be on the spot is
the thing. The work is given to the people who look after it. How
often have you been to London since my birthday? Once--and that
was the day when you went to the registry-office and brought back
the fiend who burned the bottom out of the kitchen kettle."

She hung her head and said I was just as bad.

"I know it, but I am a practical reformer. Reforms personally
attended to. Brush my frockcoat, please, if you have any idea
where it is, and my high hat, if you can find it. I am going to town
this afternoon. In my absence I expect you to finish your
illustration for the Lady's Battalion--the one where the duchess is
dis-  charging her butler for shaving in the boudoir, and leaving his
shaving-brush on the marble console-table."

"You're not nice. You know it is a humble companion refusing a
duke's offer of marriage. He does look like a footman, I know; her
arm is all wrong, and his legs are hideously out of drawing. Legs
are so difficult to do, especially in clothes. We never had models
in trousers at the Slade School--"

"Ah, these art-schools!" I said. "Now find that frock-coat, my
Michaela Angelica, and speed the parting reformer."

"I think I saw it once in the dresser drawer," she said, dreamily. "If
you'd seen it you'd have put it away. Len, talking of
shaving-brushes, how is it I used to be so tidy in the Bandbox, and
you not, and now you're tidier than I am?"

"It is your influence," said I.

"And the other's mine?"

"Well," I answered, "when two people are moderately fond of each
other they do teach each other things, don't they?"

"Then you've corrupted me?"

"And you've redeemed me, or are redeeming. When we've quite
converted each other we can begin again and change back. But the
coat, and the hat. I must shave, and there's only  just time to catch
the 11.32. For the sake of our home, for the sake of our future, for
the peace of our domestic existence, Chloe, do try to find that hat
and that coat!"

The hat was all right, but the coat was full of creases. It was not in
the dresser drawer, after all, but on the bottom shelf of the oak
side-board, and I had to iron it before I could dream of putting it
on. Chloe told me how to do it, but she owned that I did it far
better than she could have done it herself. My best boots were
mislaid, too, as it happened, and, before I had discovered them in a
corner of the bare drawing-room, I had missed the 11.32. I went up
by the 12.40, however, and in the train I wondered to myself how it
was that Chloe, who in the Bandbox had kept all in so neat an
array, was now growing more untidy than I in my most reckless
moods had ever been. It was a problem, and I bent myself to it as
the train whirled me through green pastures outlined with
elm-trees and hawthorn hedges, then through villas, red and
self-consciously trim, with their neat gardens, geranium-flushed,
calceolaria-gilded--neat as a prize map at a first-class high-school.
The problem did not resolve itself. It was not till the train was
rushing through a wilderness of yellow brick houses, all alike, all
soot-begrimed, all  standing, with their bits of blackened garden,
their stunted flowers, their carefully trained snippets of creeper, for
lives full of the courageous struggle of man's innate love of beauty
against the iron of environment, the crippling of the accident of
birth, the handicap of hereditary submission to the undeserved
darkening of life, that I began to see the answer to my question.

In our first home--the Bandbox, the little nest that had held us at
our first mating--Chloe had struggled to reproduce, and had
reproduced, on a microscopic scale, and with the aid of a woman
servant more or less tractable, the habits and methods learned in
her mother's house in Bedford. There were rules, and she followed
them. I for my part had met the new rules as part of a new and
delightful comedy, wherein my wife was heroine. At the same time
I had felt no urgent need for altering the habits of years spent in
chambers, at the mercy of an uncomplaining and systematically
dishonest laundress. But when the Bandbox--I paid it the tribute of
a perfunctory sigh, even in my railway-carriage solitude--when the
dear Bandbox was left behind, and we entered the Red House, we
entered, too, on a new life--a primitive existence where law was
not. The rules Chloe had learned in Bedford as to the duties of
servants and the  routine of domestic life were now inapplicable,
since we had no servant, and consequently no recognized routine.
We were in the position of folk cast upon a desert island (I mean
an uninhabited one, but the phraseology, as the instinct, of
boyhood survives). And here we had suddenly changed parts. The
chart of custom by which Chloe had steered in Bandbox days had
been reft from her. She had nothing left but delightful, genuine
impulses towards beauty--the arrangement of flowers, the fixing of
shelves, and the deep, eternal instinct to satisfy the cravings of
hunger in herself and hers--me. I, on the other hand, being face to
face with a new problem, met it, man fashion, with a new solution.
I perceived that order alone could make our life in the Red House
possible. As the train steamed over the bridge one practical
conclusion came as the result of my meditations. Chloe must have
a servant.

I saw several editors, received a commission to write a series of
articles on foreign politics, and a short story of strong domestic
interest. Then I stood at the corner by the Mansion House in a
meditation so deep as to provoke the amused and contemptuous
scrutiny of my fellows, and at last, just as a small boy was
murmuring at my elbow, "Makin' up your mind whether you'll  be
prime-minister or not? Well, take your time, sir; it's worth thinkin'
over," I hailed a 'bus and was borne away by it. I went straight to
Mrs. May's registry-office in Tottenham Court Road. The ladies
who attended to my needs seemed to me to have the most perfect
manners in the world. So well did they act for me that in half an
hour I had engaged an amiable general servant, who was to come
on the next Monday "as ever was."

"Now look here," I said to her, "you mustn't expect our house to be
like any one else's. We're not in the least like any one else. We live
in a very large house"--her plump face fell--"but we only use a few
rooms. Your mistress will help you a bit, and you can go out one
evening a week and every Sunday, and you can have your friends
to see you any evening"--her face brightened--"but no young men,
unless they come by twos--see? My wife and I will both help you,
and if you help us we shall all be perfectly jolly. What do you
think? Would you like to try?"

I could see the smile Mrs. May was trying to conceal, and I felt a
tremor of doubt. Perhaps, after all, it did not do to treat servants as
though they were of the same flesh and blood as one's self. 
The girl hesitated, looked doubtfully at me, I smiled at her in my
best manner, and she smiled back heartily, and as it seemed to me
without mental reservations.

"Well, sir," she said, "we can but try."

So that was settled. I felt the warm point of triumph which
punctuates the career of the born organizer.

"Monday, then," said I; "and send your box by Carter Paterson."
And with that I left well alone, and went back to Cannon Street via
the Twopenny Tube.

I had to wait half an hour for a train. On the platform was the usual
dingy, mixed crowd of clerks, type-writing girls, art students, and
City men, and among them, her red hair shining at me down the
length of the gloomy platform, a woman's figure that I knew. Her
dainty dress of muslin, sown with little bunches of violets, her
charming hat, her perfect gloves and shoes--these alone might not
have thrust her identity on me. Thank Heaven, more than one
Englishwoman wears pretty muslin gowns and picture-hats, and
has gloves and shoes that fit her. It was the set of her shoulders,
the poise of her head, the modest, graceful self-possession of her
attitude that made me bold to step behind her, and, without even a
sight of her face, to  murmur over her shoulder and into the
prettiest ear--almost--in the world, "Yolande!"

She turned in a flash, and her face came to me in that dull place
like a gleam of sunlight in a cloudy day.

"How unexpected you are," I said, "and how very, very like the
most beautiful kind of French fashion-plate."

"I was going down to see Chloe--and you. I have got a bag
somewhere," she said. "I am pretty, aren't I? I got this gown in
Paris."

"That's what I like about you!"

"The only thing?"

"The chief, just now. You don't think old clothes rhyme necessarily
with old friends. There's just time for a cup of tea--come. And then
for the Red House. We shall find Chloe in rags, clearing out the
scullery. You don't know--or rather you do, perfectly well--what a
sight for sore eyes you'll be to her."

My prophecy was fulfilled. My wife opened the door to us.

"Yolande!" she cried, "I didn't know you were back!"

"No more did I, till yesterday," said Yolande.

"Chloe!" I cried, with proper severity, "have you done that drawing
of the footman and the duchess? Your face is extremely dirty!"
  
She looked at me with that disarming blink of soft lashes for the
sake of which the harshest of recording angels would risk his
situation.

"I've been cleaning out the kitchen," she said--"it's lovely now.
Yolande, come and take your things off. He'll make the tea and set
the table. He's quite domestic now--aren't you, Benedick?"

"Yes, Beatrice," I said; "and there's a large black on your
respectable ear--the right one."

"The better to hear with, my dear."

"And why are your hands so extremely grimy?" I returned, capping
the quotation.

"The better to slap you with!" she cried, the action rhyming with
the word, and fled.

She came down to tea all white muslin and lace and pink ribbons.
"It's Yolande's fault," she said. deprecatingly. "I hate being smart
myself. It's so unsuitable to our position. Don't look at me like
that!"

Throughout tea I could look at nothing else. Yolande is a witch.
How else could she have known that in these weeks of happy, hard
work I had vaguely missed something, somehow, and had never
guessed till now that it was my wife's beauty, so unadorned, and
still so dear, that had fretted me with the unconscious desire to see
it once more fitly clothed?
  
The evening was a festival. Yolande played Chopin to us in the
dim, empty drawing-room, and if I did hold my wife's hand the
while, Yolande did not mind, for she was used to us. Chloe
showed us the duchess and footman drawing, and indeed the
duchess's arm was hopelessly wrong, and the footman's legs things
to weep over. We drank ginger-ale, always with us the outward
expression of hilarity, and, as the evening waned, sang comic
songs. When Yolande had gone to bed, in the room got ready for
the servants who never came, I caught my wife by both hands.

"Madam," said I, "why did you never tell me how pretty you
looked in pink ribbons?"

"I didn't think you cared for ribbons," she said; "besides, it's all
Yolande's fault."

"To-morrow morning," said I, "I shall kiss Yolande for this."

Chloe looked at me. "You may," she said. "I don't think she'd like
it, but you may. Only don't do it while I'm there, because it might
make me jealous."

"What, Chloe in pink ribbons jealous of Yolande in violet muslin?
I might as well be jealous of the crossing-sweeper when you smile
at him and give him pennies."

"And aren't you?" said she. "You would  be, if you were a really
nice husband. But I'll tell Yolande you said she was like a
crossing-sweeper. And she wouldn't let you kiss her, anyway!"

"What do you bet?"

"If she did it would only be to please me! And if you did it would
only be to tease me. No, you can't tease me!" She paused,
then--"And, Len," she said, "Yolande's too dear to have silly jokes
made about her, even by you and only to me, or even to you and
only by me."

"And you're too dear," I said, with my face against the pink
ribbons, "to be teased, even if I could compass it. Besides, madam,
I have been guilty of a crime--worse, an error in taste. I might be a
hair-dresser's apprentice chaffing his sweetheart of the drapery
department. Forgive me--I am a little mad to-night."

She pushed me away till she could look in my eyes.

"Len," she said, "how awful it would have been if I had married
any one else. There is no one else who understands everything. But
why did you? You never made jokes about kissing other people
before!"

"It is detestable," I said, "and it's no excuse to repeat that it was
only because I am so happy. And yet it's true. Am I forgiven?"
  
Now what made me talk that nonsense? And suppose Chloe had
laughed at it or, on the other hand, had taken it seriously, where
should we have been? Now, Heaven be praised for the gift of
understanding. If Chloe had done, had looked, anything but what
she did do and look--But Chloe is Chloe, and, thank God, mine.

Yolande stayed with us three days. The rainbow delights of our
new house seemed newly dyed when we displayed them to her
appreciative eyes. And I felt a new impulse to work, now that
Chloe had some one to bear her company as she gathered flowers,
rearranged furniture, or struggled, face all aglow, against the
fiendish arts of the kitchen range.

I wrote half my "story of strong domestic interest," and then stuck
fast. There was a scene where the hero, on the point of marriage
with a respectable and admired heiress, the friend of childhood's
hour, sees, as he walks up the church to his bridal, the face of his
old love, whom he had thought dead. This scene wanted something
besides smartness. It wanted fire, passion, delicacy of handling,
strength of grasp. And these qualities, strange to say, eluded me. I
told my woes, and received from Chloe and Yolande sympathy,
but no aid.

On that third moonlight evening, when we  sat out on the grass,
round the sun-dial, and Yolande sang Spanish and Pyrenean songs
to the tinkle of Chloe's guitar, I almost seemed to surprise in
myself the force to grapple with that scene and get the better of it;
but when they had gone to bed and I sat face to face with my
type-writer, the force shrivelled to a very agony of conscious
incompetence. I wrote three abject sentences, and went to bed
hopeless.

Next morning I took Yolande to a cricket match, and in the
evening she left us.

"I'll come again in a fortnight if you'll have me," she said, "but now
I must put on my soberest frock and a hat that would make you
weep, and interview parents who want to provide their girls with a
complete outfit of up-to-date culture, cheap."

We went up to the little country station, bareheaded, ungloved, to
the scandal of the porters and the station-master, and waved our
farewells as the train bore her away. Chloe's clean handkerchief
had a great hole in it, which she never noticed till too late, and
then we went back, she to house-work, and I to my story. I had left
it at page thirty-one; it stood now at page fifty-nine.

The story was finished. I read the pages rapidly. The story was
good, very good. All  the fire and passion and force I had longed
for and had known to be necessary were here. The story began
tamely, and ended in vivid and triumphant drama.

"Chloe!" I called.

She came, a dish-cloth in her hand and apron round her waist.

"Some one has finished the story. Read it."

She read it slowly.

"Is it good?" she asked.

"Of course it is. But did you-- Who did it?"

"Didn't you?"

"No, of course not!"

"It must have been the ghost," she said. Then she blinked at me
with long lashes, and laughed.

I laughed too.

"The ghost be it!" I said, but I read in her laughing eyes the word
that sprang to my own lips--"Yolande!"

CHAPTER IV OUR NEW TENANT

OF course we have our own little stereotyped code of honor and
morality, laid by on the shelf, ready for use, and in it we read
vaguely that one may not put one's name to another's work, or
make money by another's success. Had any one offered to finish
for me the story to which I should put my name, I had refused,
though the offer had been made by Rudyard Kipling himself. But
when a ghost finishes your story, what's to be done? As Chloe said,
"What else did the ghost do it for?" She added that of course I
must send it in. And indeed it seemed to me that the matter was at
least arguable. Yet I could not bring myself to sign my name to the
thing.

Chloe made horseshoes in her forehead, and professed herself
unable to understand my hesitation.

"If the ghost chose to finish your silly old  story," she said, "you
may be sure it wants to see itself in print."

"Over my signature?"

"Perhaps the ghost is modest, and would rather not venture to face
the public over its own signature till it's more sure of its talents.
Yes--that must be it. It's a mutual benefit. The ghost wants to see
itself printed. You wanted your story finished. There's no
obligation either way."

I bit the end of my fountain-pen till it cracked.

"Suppose we ask Yolande?" said I. Chloe laughed. And I wrote to
Yolande that evening. Chloe wrote, too--about a pattern for a
fichu, I believe--and we posted the letters in the village. When we
came home we found an unattractive working-man slouching by
our gate. As we approached, he touched his hat with a grudging
gesture.

"You the governor?" he inquired.

I ventured a modest assent.

"About these 'ere cottages of yourn, now," said he, "was you
thinkin' of lettin' e'er a one of 'em?"

"Well, no," said I, truthful in defiance of Chloe's finger-pressure on
my arm.

"Because if you was," said my visitor, rubbing a stubbly chin
reflectively, "you and me  might hit on a bargain betwixt us. My
missus an' me we're a-lookin' out for a bit of a cottage, so I don't
deceive you, governor."

My tenant-aspirant inspired me with little admiration and less
confidence, but Chloe pinched my arm again, and said,

"Can you do gardening?"

"I'm a bricklayer's laborer by trade, miss," said he.

"But if we let you have the cottage we should expect you to keep
the cottage garden tidy."

"Gardening's all I care for, out of workin'-hours," said the man,
eagerly, "and my missus, she's the same. Dotes on flowers, lilies,
and roses, and toolips, so she do."

"I'll think of it," said I, severely non-committal, and feigning
insensibility as Chloe's fingers tightened almost painfully on my
arm.

"What rent do you want to pay?" she asked.

At the word "want" a shadow of a grin passed under the reflective
hand that stroked the stubble.

"Two shillings a week was about what we thought an honest rent,"
was the answer.

"That wouldn't do at all," said my wife. "Why, the smallest cottage
has four rooms. We couldn't let it under four shillings."

"Say three and six, lady. And that's a lot to a working-man."
  
This alacritous acceptance of the raised figure should have warned
us--I, indeed, did perceive that the man wanted the cottage enough
to pay the four shillings for it. But Chloe said:

"Very well. Three and six a week--that's nine pounds two a year.
When do you want to come in?"

"Our time's up next Saturday, miss," said the man, "and we could
get our bits of sticks moved then. It's a stiffish rent, miss, is nine
pun two a year, but there's the garden. I am dead nuts on a bit of
garden."

"On Saturday, then," said Chloe, and our new tenant left us. I was
full of doubts and distrusts, which I turned to impart to Chloe; but
as our gate slammed behind us she threw her arms round my neck
in a transport of avaricious enthusiasm.

"Oh, Len! How splendid! Didn't I do the arithmetic beautifully?
Why did we never think of letting the cottages before? We'll let all
the others--three and sixpence each--and the big ones--ought to
fetch more. Why, it's fourteen shillings a week. What a heap of
money!"

"What do you propose to buy with it, Mrs. Midas?"

"Time!" she answered, promptly. "Now I sha'n't feel so wicked if I
waste a whole day on  pottering. Why don't you write an ode or a
sonnet or something, about pottering? It's the most glorious thing
in the world. And this man is going to pay me to potter while he
lays bricks. Noble, splendid creature!"

"This man," I said, "exactly; we don't even know his name, we
haven't a hint of his address. And who are we--land-owners, truly,
but born potterers, and lacking the education accorded to those
born to the purple of landlordism--who are we that we should ask a
bricklayer's laborer for references?"

"Oh, dear!" said she. "I never thought of that! Never mind--we can
ask him for them on Saturday."

But on Saturday it was too late. We learned, indeed, during the
course of the day, our tenant's name, and it was Prosser, than
which no surname claims a larger share of my personal
abhorrence; but where was the use of asking for references when
the moving had been effected during the hours immediately
following the dawn, when our after-breakfast expedition to the
cottage showed us the "bits of sticks" already dumped down on the
cottage-garden flower-beds, and a slatternly drab of a woman
carrying them slowly in? The furniture looked very dirty.

"Not, I fear, the most desirable of tenants,"  I murmured, as we
delicately withdrew. "The furniture looks as if it had come out of
the dustbin, and so does the lady."

"Oh, don't be so harsh," said my wife; "remember what our
furniture looked like--all dusty and forlorn and friendless--when it
sat outside the Bandbox waiting for the vans. And as for the
woman, you wouldn't like any one to judge me by how I looked the
day we moved."

"I remember just how you looked," I said. And indeed I did. "My
dear, Yolande was absolutely right. We are perfect Babes in the
Wood. We have let our cottage to the ideally undesirable tenant. I
don't for a moment believe that he is a bricklayer's laborer! More
likely a counterfeit-coiner's journeyman--or perhaps a master-thief.
He is ideally undesirable, you are impetuous, and I am weakly
yielding. You and I together deserve to be sat on by a Board. Why
can't we turn ourselves into a limited company and be run, together
with our little property, by competent directors?"

"We must try to arrange it," she answered, gayly. "And now cheer
up--the Prossers will be better when they get straight. That girl's
coming to-day--I must get her room ready. You might just clean
the front doorstep--it's done with hearth-stone, just like the kitchen
hearth.  It is enough to discourage any girl to come to a house
wrapped in a mantle of decay, with green mould on the doorstep.
Then afterwards we'll do the kitchen together."

It was with but half a heart that I collected pail, hearth-stone, and
house-flannel. I had to take a scrubbing-brush to the green mould,
and I wondered why the favorite implement gave me so little joy
as I wielded it. The sudden arrival of the new maid's box, by Carter
Paterson, enlightened me. I found myself now working with vigor
and enthusiasm. Since she really was coming! I knew then that I
had never believed she would come, and it had seemed futile to
spread milk-white over the doorstep, just for Chloe and me, whose
eyes its blotted gray and moss green had always delighted. Now I
finished the doorstep con amore, and hastened to the kitchen
where Chloe and a hammer were busy together. I scrubbed the
dressers and the table and the deal shelf that pulls out under the
window. Chloe is always wise enough to feed energy with
praise--a diet too often grudged it.

"You do scrub beautifully," she said. "I believe you think the brush
is nobler than the pen."

"You see I am an able 'performer on the instrument,' as Jane
Austen would say."
  
"Dear Jane," said Chloe. "There--there's glory for you!"

She had nailed up a deep flounce of green and red chintz along the
chimney-piece, and another above the windows. A cushion to
match nestled in the shabby Windsor arm-chair we had recently
picked up for two and threepence in a back street in Deptford.

"Isn't it pretty? Isn't it cosey, and old-fashioned, and farm-housy? If
this doesn't make her stay, nothing will! I'll get the hearth-rug out
of our bedroom. You won't mind, will you? And do put your
instrument away--there's no more scrubbing, and she'll be here
directly. Do you think we could bear to let her have two of the
brass candlesticks out of the white parlor for this mantel-piece?"

"No," I said, firmly; "there are limits. But put up the cake-tins--I
polished them the other day."

The cake-tins were a shining crown to the splendor of the chintz
flounce. Our crockery, well spread out upon the two large dressers,
made a brave show. Our bedroom hearth-rug, also woven of reds
and greens, showed up the beauty of the chintz flounce, which in
its turn, by its neat newness, added lustre and importance to the
hearth-rug. It was indeed a beautiful picture  --a poem, even, set to
music by the singing of the new kitchen kettle, and I did not
grudge the sacrifice of the parlor table-cloth to the completion of
that radiant harmony.

We had our lunch in a very great hurry, so as to get the plates
washed up before our new servant came. By two o'clock all was
ready. Ever since the joyous day when in my well-ironed
frock-coat I had gone forth and engaged a servant, Chloe had
ventured, day by day, on more and more daring preparations for
the maid's arrival, and Chloe had dragged me with her. We had
cleaned the white parlor--when we had a servant we could afford
to sit in a parlor. We had laid down a rug or two on the
red-and-white marble of the hall, and hung two or three old prints
on the dull brown of its walls. We sat out some oak chairs and the
old elm kneading-trough in it by way of furniture. We had put up
dimity curtains in the new maid's bedroom: Chloe insisted on
these, not because she admired the material, but because "dimity"
is such a nice word--the born sister of lavender, and tall presses,
and well-scrubbed boards, and patch-work quilts. We had a
patch-work quilt--the gift of a gaunt great-aunt of mine--and we
sacrificed it to the fitness of things, and let it live with the dimity
curtains. Chloe adorned the dimity-covered dress-  ing-table with a
smart, new pin-cushion with blue bows, and set a blue jug of pink
roses on the broad window-sill. Our servant's bedroom was as
pretty as paint. I said so, and Chloe said:

"Nonsense! it's only conventionally correct. All good girls' rooms
in books are like this--if they're servants; if they're young ladies it
is muslin instead of dimity. And the pin-cushion is sometimes
pink--you put letters under it when you run away, you know."

"I hope the roses aren't just the touch too much," I said; "we
mustn't spoil her."

"Roses spoil nobody."

"Or make her think us lunatics."

"We are that," said Chloe, "and it's better to recognize frankly that
concealment is impossible. No one could live with us a month and
not see how silly we are. It's better not to try to break things to
people. Let her know the worst at once. If she doesn't have to
waste her mental energies on finding out our follies, she may use
them to perceive our virtues. I sometimes can't help thinking that
we really are rather nice."

No courtier expecting a visit from his sovereign ever waited the
monarch's advent with half the anxious embarrassment that was
ours as, I in flannels and Chloe in soft muslin, we sat in the 
wicker chairs by the front porch, with our books and our
work-basket, in an atmosphere of elegant leisure, ayant l'air de
rien, just as if we sat there idly every day of the week.

At half-past three the white smoke of the down train clouded the
blue above our willow-trees. Chloe put her hand to her heart.

"If I faint, don't be surprised. But you must pretend to be! Don't let
her think fainting's a habit of mine. All the other servants came to
us and they went, and there it was. But this is a crisis--an epoch."

"That's because you feel that she's going to stay," I said; "her
personality is influencing yours, as she comes down the lane."

Breaking a silence full of emotion came the click of the front gate.

"Courage!" I murmured.

"My heart's in my mouth," said she.

"I must have mislaid it. Give it back at once!"

"How can you talk nonsense at a solemn moment like this?
No--don't come with me. I'll face the danger alone!"

I saw her meet the new servant and lead her into the house.

It was an anxious time. I could not read, and I was trying to go on
with Chloe's duster-  hemming when she came back, with bright
eyes and no horseshoes on her brow.

"She's a dear," said my wife, "and so are you. And I was quite right
about the roses and the pin-cushion. When I took her into the
bedroom she looked quite blank, and then she said:

"'This is the spare room, I suppose, mum.' And I said, 'No, it's
yours.' And she just said, 'Well' and sniffed at the roses. And she
came down almost directly. Oh, what beautiful things clean caps
and aprons are! And she's getting the tea, Len. And she likes the
kitchen. And she said it was like their kitchen at home. I do
believe she's going to be nice!"

She was. Chloe and I had simplified our lives, as people always do
when their own hands supply their wants. Mary accepted Chloe's
assistance for two days, and then gently but firmly declined further
help.

"Why," she said, "I could do the work here with one hand behind
me! You go along, mum, and play the pianna, and mess about with
the flowers, or make your pretty pictures."

The change in our lives was like the change from a stormy night in
mid-ocean to the mid-summer calm of a daisied meadow. The
house was always neat and clean, and yet there was    time for
everything. I wrote now, sometimes we went to town when we
wanted to go, orders grew, and prosperity seemed, like the
rainbow, to be waiting for us at the end of the next field. It was a
happy breathing-space. Yolande wrote, fully endorsing Chloe's
view, and insisting that the ghost would certainly not have been
silly enough to write half a story unless it had wanted to see it in
print, and recommending us to leave the galleys conveniently lying
about in the more haunted-looking parts of the Red House, so that
the ghost might, if it pleased, correct its own proofs. So we sent off
the story, and the editor wrote to me. I got his letter at breakfast,
and I threw it over to Chloe across the tea-tray.

"Fortune smiles at last," said I. "Here's to the ghost!" and I drank its
health in boiling tea.

The letter had all the beauty of simplicity.

"Dear sir," it said, "your story, 'The Return,' to hand. It is quite
satisfactory, and if you care to supply a series of six, in the same
style, we could, I think, find room for them in the magazine during
next year." The editor said something vague but pleasant about
terms, and added that he was faithfully mine, and the letter
concluded with the name of a very lucky man. 
"It is my name at the foot," I said. "This piece of luck has
happened to me! It ought to have been addressed to Messrs. Ghost
& Co., oughtn't it? Aid me, ye powers! Six stories!"

"In the same style," said Chloe, getting up from the tea-tray and
coming behind me to pull my ears in sheer gladness of heart. "Are
you going to imitate the ghost's style, Len?"

I did not answer.

She rested her chin on my shoulder.

"Of course you write much better than the ghost," she said, hastily;
"but he does say the same style."

"I have written stories before--and I can do it again, I suppose,"
said I. "I only happened to get stuck with that story. I should have
finished it all right if the ghost hadn't interfered. I wish to goodness
she'd let it alone!"

Chloe took her chin from my shoulder and went back to the
tea-tray.

"Will you have another cup?" she said, coldly.

"What's the matter?"

She did not answer.

Then I caught at my lost temper and secured it. I laughed.

"What!" I said, "take part with a nasty, stuck-up ghost against your
own husband--so talented, yet so modest? If I am to have a rival,
let it be  flesh and blood, and not a ghost whose head I cannot
punch, whose back I cannot horsewhip!"

"Well, then," she said, trying to balance a teaspoon on the
milk-jug, "I think the ghost only meant to be kind, and I don't like
to hear you speak as if you thought it had no business to interfere."

"I see," I said, slowly.

She flashed a quick glance at me. "Yes," she said, "I see you see.
Here's luck to the six stories!"

It was in the morning after one of Mary's evenings out that she
came to Chloe and said:

"Please, mum, are those your cottages along by the garden wall?"

Chloe smiled, scenting another tenant.

"Yes," she said. "Do you know any one--"

"Well, mum," said Mary, "I think it's no more but right that you
should know it."

Chloe said, "What?"

Mary replied: "Why, their goings-on! I see him last night, as I
come in, as drunk as drunk, lying all over the front garden, and I
went down this morning to have another look."

"And was he still there--all over the front garden?" I asked.

"No, sir, not him, but everything else you can think of. But I won't
say not a word more,  sir; but it's not respectable, and I thought you
ought to know, sir. You're that innocent, sir, if you'll excuse me
saying so. I know you won't believe no harm of any one till you
have caught 'em at it. You just go and look, sir, that's all."

Chloe and I walked down the garden path, hand in hand, in
agitated silence. Not till we were safe hidden under the twisted
quince-tree did we dare to look at each other. Then we sat down in
the long grass expressly to laugh at our ease.

"And the worst of it is it's true," Chloe said. "You are innocent.
No--don't be offended. I'm afraid I am, too. We are Babes in the
Wood, Len, just as Yolande said, and Mary has the sense to see it."

I murmured something about references.

"Yes, I know you said so, and I know it's my fault; but other things
are yours. You are innocent. Don't deny it. Oh, Len, we ought to be
living in a villa, and paying proper little calls, and giving proper
little dinners, and decorating our dinner-table with proper little cut
flowers in proper little cut-glass vases; and when we dined alone
the fishmonger would send in two proper little whitings with their
proper little tails in their mouths; and we should have roast
chicken, and it would be minced the next day, and  everything
would go by dull, beautiful, proper little clock-work; and you
would say what a good manager I was, because we neither of us
should have any idea what good management really meant. We're
failures, Len. We haven't the wit to run a great estate."

"In fact," I said, "we've bitten off a larger chunk than we can
chew."

"Don't be vulgar!"

"I'm not--I'm trying to be American."

"You're not succeeding. They don't talk like that. I knew an
American once. He was the nicest--"

"I know. He thought you were the nicest. Why didn't you marry
him?"

"Because he was rich, and it's my destiny to ruin a poor man. Len, I
wish I wasn't such an idiot!"

"Or that I wasn't. That would do just as well. But don't let's weep
about it yet. Perhaps Mary exaggerated. Our tenant may merely
have been in a fit. No known system of manorial management can
avert fits among the tenantry."

"But she said, 'You go and look, that's all!'"

"Well," said I, rising, "I will go and look. Will you come?"

"No," said she. "I'm frightened. Yes, I will, of course." 
And we went.

Outside the red wall of our garden is a strip of ground bounded by
a hawthorn hedge, and at the end of this stand the two cottages.
We passed along the winding shrubbery-walk--by reason of its
darkness the only path of our garden whereon the weeds were not
breast-high--and so, pushing through the tall-standing weeds, dock
and nettle, sow-thistle and cow-parsley, of the cottage garden, to
the square of ground that stands between our two cottages and the
road. Here were no juicy, green, upstanding weeds, graceful in
their arrogant victory over flowers and fruits. The green weeds
were trampled down to a damp, yellow, sodden mass, sordid and
evilsmelling. Old meat-cans, sardine-tins, broken boots, decayed
brooms, and battered saucepans were strewn around, "like flowers
at a festival." Dirty rags festooned the faded blue of the railings;
the family linen, wetted but not washed, hung on the elder-bushes,
whose white blossoms drooped degraded under the foul burden. A
very dirty blanket hung out of the bedroom window, and on the
doorstep, among dust and flue, bones, crusts, and the
miscellaneous sweepings of a filthy floor, three indescribably
unengaging children, with dirty noses, were playing moodily and
without smiles. Their playthings were a  blade-bone of mutton,
two muddy clothes-pegs, and a dead mouse.

Chloe is absurdly fond of children, but--or, perhaps, therefore--she
turned away with a shudder. We went home boiling with
indignation, but in the crucible of our thought our rage, as it
cooled, left as precipitate the unmistakable consciousness of our
own incompetence. True, as Chloe said, it was she who had
accepted a tenant so manifestly undesirable--lured by a bait of
fourteen shillings a month. She had done it, but I had stood by and
let it be done. Now, however, I must act. I would act. Was it, I
wonder, an inexcusable cowardice or a wise discretion which led
me to refrain from giving Mr. Prosser notice in a personal
interview? I wrote to him, and bade him leave my cottage at the
end of the week. But at the end of the week he was still there, and
on the Monday evening, as Chloe and I wandered in the green
forest of weeds and flowers that was our garden, the spell of its
silence was broken for us by the sound of Mr. Prosser's voice,
uplifted in one of the less agreeable comic songs of the year before
the year before last.

I went down at once to give him, personally, that notice to quit
which I found him in no fit state to receive. Another call, in the
morning,  found my tenant conscious, indeed, but little amenable.

"I gave you written notice to quit last week," said I. "How is it
you've not gone?"

Mr. Prosser, unshaved, without tie, collar, or boots, settled his
head between his shoulders, and said he didn't know anything
about no notice.

"Well, anyhow," said I, "you've got to clear out now. I want the
cottage."

"Right you are, sir," said he, "but there must be proper notice give
an' took."

"I give you notice now," said I, "and, while I am here, suppose you
hand over the rent."

Then my tenant drew himself up and uttered these memorable
words:

"I'm a yearly tenant, I am, and I pays on quarter-day, and six
months' notice is what I'm entitled to. 'Nine pun two a year,' your
missus said."

"Very well. I shall consult my solicitor," I said, and turned away
helpless. I didn't know--how should I, though I had kicked my
heels, briefless, in the Inner Temple for at least two years--whether
he was entitled to that or anything else.

I wrote to my solicitor. I had never had a solicitor before, but I
acquired one at once--  an old chum. He wrote me three pages of
advice, in which a writ of ejectment loomed large. But his private
opinion, as I read it between the lines, seemed to be that I had got
myself into a tight place by my own folly, and had better trust to
time to get me out of it.

Our garden's peace was broken. We never knew now when the
hoarse, raucous voice of our tenant might desecrate the moonlit
stillness with coarse echoes of transpontine musichalls. The
knowledge of Mr. Prosser's nearness seemed to smirch the clean
sweetness of life. The very jasmine stars seemed less white for the
presence of our tenant's sordid m‚nage on the other side of our red
wall. And Mary, day by day, tormented us with fresh tales of what
was being said in the village of our tenant's antecedents and
character, and, by implication, of ours. And all the time my
inability to set steadfastly to work was fretting at my self-control.
It is like a mouse gnawing at the cord of life--the longing to work,
and the inability to conquer the thousand tiny obstacles that fate
erects--fate, backed by one's own folly in having "bitten off a
larger chunk than one can chew";--I still think that a most
excellent phrase, and not vulgar, only homely, going straight to the
mark as the homely expression  of a great truth may be permitted
to do. Chloe was worried also--her editors were clamoring for the
illustrations which she was now incapable of working at. And Mr.
Prosser was a live blister, and, like a blister, he hurt more and
more the longer we had to bear with him.

I was sitting in our little work-room one morning, pen in hand,
hardly able to meet with a confident eye the white paper that, as I
stared at it, seemed to stare at me in return--to stare rudely,
contemptuously, in the confident superiority of its fulfilment of its
destiny, as opposed to my manifest inability to fulfil mine. It was
waiting to be written on, and no one could ask more of it. And I
was waiting to write on it; and a good deal more than mere waiting
was obviously demanded of me by our financial circumstances and
my own self-respect. The six stories--"in the style of the ghost"--I
longed to get them written with a longing more desperate than the
longing of the lover for his mistress, the mother for her child.
Though more desperate, it had not, however, the force of these
natural desires, because it was not a desire for the thing in
itself--not a desire to achieve, to attain--but depended for its
vitality on a secondary motive. I longed to write the stories
because I wanted the money they would bring  to me. The longing
was keen enough to be painful, not strong enough to get itself
satisfied. So I sat idle, and drew fancy portraits of Chloe on the
blotting-paper. I turned it over hastily as I heard her footstep on the
kitchen floor, and I was bending over a virgin quarto page rimmed
with unsoiled pink when she came in.

I drew my breath in sharply. Her face, her eyes, her whole bearing
announced disaster unspeakable.

"What is it?" I cried, and I am sure I must have turned pale.

"Len, do you love me?" she asked, clasping her hands with a
charming dramatic movement.

"Better than my life, of course," I said, hurriedly, "but I'm just
starting on this story, and if it's some domestic detail--"

"No, it can't wait," said she, sitting down on the edge of the table,
"and it's not a variation on the domestic theme. It's the theme itself.
Len--it's all over!"

"What's all over?"

"Everything. She's going to leave."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I was too upset to ask her. I just came to you."

I resisted an impulse to put aside the six re-  munerative stories
and spend the rest of the day in consoling my wife.

"I don't know what it is. We've been nice to her, I'm sure! She likes
us--at least I thought she did. It's Destiny--it's like
Maeterlinck--whatever we do turns out all anyhow. There's a curse
upon us!"

"Speak for yourself," I said, cheerfully. "You may be cursed,
though it's barely polite of you to say so, but I am blessed above all
that live, I'm blessed if I'm not--since you--"

She stamped her foot. "Don't you see," she said, "it's serious,
horribly serious? I wish I had never come here. I wish we were
back in the Bandbox--there! Now crow over me, and tell me you
told me so all the time!"

I told her something quite different, and presently, when we were
calmer, I said,

"At least we may as well know why she's going."

"I'll ask her," said Chloe, drying her eyes. "It's probably Prosser. If
I were you I should just take him by the shoulders and turn him
out. You're quite strong enough."

"Yes, and have an action for assault and a hundred pounds'
damages," said I, wise with the wisdom of my solicitor. "Go and
ask her. Perhaps it's not Prosser. Even he, fiend with-  out
references as he is, can't be responsible for everything. Perhaps
she's seen the ghost."

I had completed a fancy sketch of Mary giving notice, and alleging
her reasons by unmistakable gestures indicating the ghost, in the
background, when Chloe returned.

"Well?" said I.

"Well?" said she.

"Have you found out?"

"It's all right," said Chloe, with a sigh of deep relief. "We haven't
done anything. She is awfully fond of us--but she must go."

"Why?"

"She's going to marry the baker."

"Lucky man!"

"It's a love-affair," said Chloe--"the prettiest story. They couldn't
marry before because he wasn't well enough off, and now an uncle
has left him some money, and he's bought a partnership."

"And how long have they been waiting for each other? How many
long years of priceless constancy, tried like gold in the furnace?"

"That's the worst of it," said Chloe, blushing, as I live; "she's only
known him for a month. But servants are expeditious as the wind
in matters of the heart."

"Charles Reade: Hard Cash--yes. Well, it's hard on us." 
"But it's very nice for them," said my wife. "You ought to feel ever
so much sympathy with lovers!"

"I do," said I, "especially when they are married and live in a house
miles too big for them."

"Oh, Len," she said, "are you really so very sorry for yourself?"

"I am just as sorry for myself as you are for me."

"And I'm just as sorry for you as you can possibly be for yourself.
Where had we got to?"

"We had got to Mary's marrying the baker, and your not minding
being left without a servant because of your admiration for the
beauty of constant love."

"Let's go into the garden and finish talking about it."

"I could talk all day about love and constancy," said I, "but my
story--"

"Bother the story!" said she, "and it's not love I want to talk about,
unless you can't keep off the subject. It's advertisements, and
registry-offices, and Prosser."

So we went into the garden and talked.

The garden chooses one's subjects for one, and it would not listen
to any of Chloe's subjects. It was more tolerant of mine.

CHAPTER V THE LOAFERY

I WAS writing in the red-and-white marble hall that morning--I
really had made a beginning on the first of the six stories. It was
not a good beginning, but there it was. I had reached page three,
and knew that unless any domestic event more than commonly
cataclysmic befell that day I should see the sun set on twelve pages
of laborious type-writing.

The walls of the marble hall are thick, and the windows look to the
northeast, so that even when the sun is turning the garden to fine
gold, and the westerly rooms to a burning, fiery furnace, the hall
remains cool as a cave. Through the open door I could see the
feathery flowers of the Spanish chestnut; through one window I
could see the copper-beech, wine-dark, and through the other a gap
in the avenue showed me a square of blue sky backing a single
pillar of Normandy poplar, straight, slender, self-  possessed. The
garden was full of bird noises and the faint rustle of leaves. In the
kitchen sounded the clink of silver--of electro-plate, to be more
accurate--and the chime of china. The tapping of my Remington
hardly did more than underline a silence which it might have
broken to an ear that loved its monotonous music less than did
mine.

The hall is the great highway of the Red House. Chloe passed
through now and then with duster and broom, with an armful of
blue-frilled cushions, with a folded rug, with something that rattled
in a covered waste-paper basket. She looked at me, and I knew she
was wondering why I did not ask her what she was playing at. But
I forbore, because I had reached the fourth page, and I dared not
tempt fate by pausing to enjoy more deeply the charm of a life my
right to which I ought, without doubt, even at that moment to be
earning. Besides, I feared to break the spell. When once the fatal
third page is passed fluency holds her own against ordinary
attacks. Not against Chloe, if one allows her to begin to explain a
new idea. Yet my fingers worked more slowly, and my full stops
gave me time to count forty instead of four, as they tell us to do at
school, just because I could not either resist or understand a
growing im-  pression that my wife did not want me to ask any
questions. Had I felt that it would please her to be questioned. I
could have wrestled with the definite temptation to please her, and
have thrown it. As it was, my phrases grew feebler, my narrative
less convincing. I had to clutch with both hands at my vanishing
interest in my story; and when the struggle was over I found that I
had complicated the career of my hero with two wives, a
dissipated youth, and a proposed highway robbery. And my hero
was intended to shine in a milieu of "strong domestic interest."

I gathered the pages together; it was lunchtime. The blue and gold
of the morning were overclouded with thick gray; the sky looked
like the canvas roof of a travelling-circus tent. A few first drops
made splashes on the door-step big as five-shilling pieces. Then
down came the rain--straight, strong, masterful.

"I knew it was going to rain," said Chloe. "How good it is to hear
it! Don't you feel almost as glad of it as if you were a tree? Fancy
standing up to it and holding out all your leaves to feel the splash
of it!"

"It makes work easier," I said. "Now you can't entice me away
from my stories and tempt me to waste the golden hours in the
garden." 
"That's the worst of this house," she said--"everything inside it
urges to industry. The white parlor is so proper, I never sit in it
without feeling that I ought to be doing open-work embroidery, if
not working a sampler. What heaps of work we shall do in the
winter when there's no dear garden to tempt us!"

"I wonder--"

It was Chloe who talked just then. I was trying to keep a few
tentacles fixed on my story, and I was determined that I would ask
no questions. After lunch I said:

"Coffee?"

"It's not ready yet," said she, rising. Then, "Len," she said, abruptly,
"I've got something to show you."

" Not more rabbits?" I said, for only the week before it had been
six baby rabbits that she had to show, found in our orchard, and
painfully fed by Chloe, with the finger of a white kid glove dipped
in warm milk. The rabbits had not lived.

"No, no--how can you remind me of that? Come."

She led me up the oak stairs, along the gallery, and up a further
narrower flight. We were among the nest of deserted rooms on the
second floor. Chloe threw open a door, pulled me through, and
shut it quickly. 
It was a large room, swept and cleaned; three long windows,
curtained with cascades of Virginia-creeper, filled it with soft
green twilight.

There were no ornaments, there were no easy-chairs, there were no
flowers and no carpets. Only one Persian rug on the floor, and a
great divan, twelve or fourteen feet long, against one of the walls.
On the shelves in the recesses by the fireplace were some thirty
books, a large deal table held a solid inkstand, a smaller deal table
held a brass tray with cups and tins. Two Windsor chairs stood
against the big table.

"Now I'll make coffee," she said, turning to the brass tray.

"Coffee seems very flat. Is it possible that you aren't going to
satisfy my raging curiosity? What is this room?"

"It's the loafery," she said. "In the winter, as you say, we shall need
a place to loaf in."

"I didn't say so."

"Yes, you did. Try the divan."

I did. It crackled when I sat down, but it was very comfortable.

"Chloe," I said, "come here!"

"I can't. I'm making the coffee." And indeed she had lighted the
spirit-lamp to that end.

"Do you know that you are blushing as though  you had been
detected in pocket-picking, or in some generous act? Why are you
embarrassed? Why are you shy? Why do you screen yourself
behind a spirit-lamp? Why have you done this? And why don't you
rush into my arms as a dutiful wife should, and confess how you
came to have such a beautiful idea?"

"You do like it, then?"

"Like it? I protest, by all my household gods, that if I had been a
bachelor inhabiting this house, thus, and in no other way, should I
have furnished my living-room!"

"Why 'if you were a bachelor'?"

"Because my wife likes pretty things. She likes green Flemish pots,
and brass warming-pans, and Sheffield-plate candlesticks, and
flowers; and, as a husband, I like what she likes. Chloe, why are
there no flowers here?"

She pointed to the green screen of leaves at the window.

I got up and began to walk up and down.

"You're a witch," said I. "How did you know exactly what I liked?
Here is space--nothing to knock down! And form--no curtains to
break the fine lines of these old windows. And color--look at the
green light; it's like a fairy palace lighted by glowworm-lamps,
especially when that gleam of sunlight came! Chloe,  how did you
know? Is it because you love me very much?"

"Not in the least," she said, briskly. "It's because--Len, don't laugh
at me--I knew how to do the room because it's what I like, too!"

She had made the coffee and poured it out. Then she came and
took my arm. Outside the rain pattered pleasantly on the green
leaves and on the roof of the balcony.

"That's why I felt silly and why I blushed--only, of course, I never
did blush. I seem to be turning into somebody else, and perhaps
you won't like me so much. Or I'm half myself and half somebody
else, and I don't know which half is really you. It didn't cost
anything, hardly," she went on, irrelevantly. "The divan is only
orange-boxes filled with straw, and covered with those old green
curtains--you know--the ones that were so faded. And the table is
out of the kitchen--the two shelves that pull out are quite enough
there, Mary says. And that's all."

We sat down among the blue-frilled cushions. "I bought the stuff
for these, of course--the green twirlies on them just match the old
curtains," she said. "And that really is all." 
"Honest Injun?" I said, severely.

"Oh," she said, tossing her head, "if you think I really did it to
please you--"

"But tell me, then," I pleaded.

"I don't know," she said, confusedly, resting her elbows on her
knees and her head in her hands. "You see, the Red House is so
big. It's like Shakespeare or Goethe, and the Bandbox was like
Savoy opera. And I hate mixing things up. And then it is so awful
to have to dust things! Wasn't it Thoreau who threw away his
curios because he couldn't be bothered to dust them? And Mary's
going, and I thought if one could have a room with just only what
one needed--a lounge, a table, two chairs--we can put more books
if you like. But I thought--if you would--we needn't use it only for
loafing; we could bring anything we liked here--work or anything;
but I thought if you would agree never to leave anything here, but
take everything away when we'd done it, whatever it was, then we
should always have one room tidy--at least the untidiness would
never be more than one day deep. It's letting the litter of the days
overlap that makes everything so hopeless. And I thought, perhaps,
I should get some work done here."

"You are a genius," I said, "and I am Prince  Fortunate. I only
regret one thing, and that is, that I did not think of it myself."

"If you had you wouldn't have done it," she said, quickly--"that's
just it. Because you thought I--and so I did--but-- Anyway, you're
pleased?"

"I am."

"The odd thing is that I think I must be two people, because if I
had heaps of servants I should have the green pottery and brass and
things in every room but this. Len, since we came to live here
everything seems different. I feel as if I were swimming for my life
in a great sea--nothing's the same as I used to think it was."

"Nothing?"

"Only us. I wonder if you understand--"

"My dear," I said, "we've tumbled out of our doll's house into the
real world."

"Oh no, this isn't the real world--it's too nice."

"Into a new world, then--a world where we have to think for
ourselves and judge things on their merits. We're like Columbus,
madam. The really important thing is to find out for one's self,
without any sort of mistake, what are the things one cares
about--the things that matter--" 
"And the things one doesn't care about--those are much more
important--the things one has just because other people have
them--at least, if that's not the reason I don't know what is. A