level heavy brows, gave a suggestion of something almost Oriental to
her face. She was dressed simply in black, and a transparent black
veil, falling from her wide hat and flung back, framed her face most
becomingly in square crisp folds.

She and Barry presently walked up River Street in the mellow
afternoon sunlight, and through the old wooden gates of the Holly
grounds. On every side were great high-flung sprays of overgrown
roses, dusty and choked with weeds, ragged pepper tassels dragged in
the grass, and where the path lay under the eucalyptus trees it was
slippery with the dry, crescent-shaped leaves. Bees hummed over rank
poppies and tangled honeysuckle; once or twice a hummingbird came
through the garden on some swift, whizzing journey, and there were
other birds in the trees, little shy brown birds, silent but busy in
the late afternoon. Close to the house an old garden faucet dripped
and dripped, and a noisy, changing group of the brown birds were
bathing and flashing about it. The old Hall stood on a rise of
ground, clear of the trees, and bathed in sunshine. It was an ugly
house, following as it did the fashion of the late seventies; but it
was not undignified, with its big door flanked by bay-windows and
its narrow porch bounded by a fat wooden balustrade and heavy
columns. The porch and steps were weather-stained and faded, and
littered now with fallen leaves and twigs.

Barry opened the front door with some difficulty, and they stepped
into the musty emptiness of the big main hall. There was a stairway
at the back of the house with a colored glass window on the landing,
and through it the sunlight streamed, showing the old velvet carpet
in the hall below, and the carved heavy walnut chairs and tables,
and the old engravings in their frames of oak and walnut mosaic. The