'Moderately. He declares he has no money to give them.'

'And yet he spent eighteen hundred pounds last week at that Christie
sale!' said the Rector with a laugh. 'And now I suppose the new
secretary will add fuel to the flame. I saw Pamela for a minute
alone, and she said Miss Bremerton was "just as much gone on Greek
things as father," and they were like a pair of lunatics when the
new vases came down.'

'Oh, blow the secretary!' said Sir Henry with exasperation. 'And
meanwhile his daughters can't get a penny out of him for any war
purpose whatever! Well, I must go on.'

They parted, and Sir Henry put his cob into a sharp trot which
soon brought him in sight of a distant building--low and
irregular--surrounded by trees, and by the wide undulating slopes
of the park.

'Dreadfully ugly place,' he said to himself, as the house grew
plainer; 'rebuilt at the worst time, by a man with no more taste
than a broomstick. Still, he was the sixteenth owner, from father to
son. That's something.'

And he fell to thinking, with that half-ironic depreciation which he
allowed to himself, and would have stood from no one else, of his
own brand-new Georgian house, built from the plans of a famous
American architect, ten years before the war, out of the profits of
an abnormally successful year, and furnished in what he believed to
be faultless taste by the best professional decorator he could find.