AFTERWARD
January 1910


I


"Oh, there IS one, of course, but you'll never know it."

The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a
bright June garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp
perception of its latent significance as she stood, in the
December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into the
library.

The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they
sat at tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very
house of which the library in question was the central, the
pivotal "feature." Mary Boyne and her husband, in quest of a
country place in one of the southern or southwestern counties,
had, on their arrival in England, carried their problem straight
to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it in her own case;
but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously,
several practical and judicious suggestions that she threw it
out: "Well, there's Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo's
cousins, and you can get it for a song."

The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms--its
remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water