She spoke with the pert assurance of a pretty girl who is only playing
the servant "to oblige." The agent looked irritably at the ugly gap in
the fine tracing overhead, and then at Thyrza.

"Mind your own business, please, Miss Thyrza!" And he walked quickly on
toward a farther door.

Thyrza flushed, and made a face at him as he turned his back. The Dixons
followed the agent into the next room, Mrs. Dixon throwing behind her an
injunction to Thyrza to run upstairs and give a last look to the
bedrooms.

"Why isn't there a light here?" said the agent impatiently. He struck one
from some matches in his pocket, and Mrs. Dixon hastily brought a candle
from a huge writing-table standing in the middle of the floor.

Except for that writing-table, and some fine eighteenth-century
bookcases, brass-latticed, which ran round the walls, fitting their every
line and moulding with delicate precision, the room was entirely empty.
Moreover, the bookcases did not hold a single book, and the writing-table
was bare. But for any person of taste, looking round him in the light of
the candle which Mrs. Dixon held, the room was furnished. All kinds of
human and civilized suggestion breathed from the table and the bookcases.
The contriving mind, with all its happy arts for the cheating and
adorning of life, was to be felt.

Mr. Tyson took it differently.

"Look here!"--he said peremptorily to Mrs. Dixon--"you mind what you're
doing with that table. It's worth a mint of money."