place to paint these confounded people. We drove off in the steady
downpour. The roads were a mass of yellow mud; the endless flat
grazing-grounds under the oak-trees, after having been burnt to cinders in
a long drought, were turned into a hideous brown sop; the country seemed
intolerably monotonous.

My spirits sank lower and lower. I began to meditate upon the modern Gothic
country-house, with the usual amount of Morris furniture, Liberty rugs, and
Mudie novels, to which I was doubtless being taken. My fancy pictured very
vividly the five or six little Okes--that man certainly must have at least
five children--the aunts, and sisters-in-law, and cousins; the eternal
routine of afternoon tea and lawn-tennis; above all, it pictured Mrs. Oke,
the bouncing, well-informed, model housekeeper, electioneering,
charity-organising young lady, whom such an individual as Mr. Oke would
regard in the light of a remarkable woman. And my spirit sank within me,
and I cursed my avarice in accepting the commission, my spiritlessness in
not throwing it over while yet there was time. We had meanwhile driven into
a large park, or rather a long succession of grazing-grounds, dotted about
with large oaks, under which the sheep were huddled together for shelter
from the rain. In the distance, blurred by the sheets of rain, was a line
of low hills, with a jagged fringe of bluish firs and a solitary windmill.
It must be a good mile and a half since we had passed a house, and there
was none to be seen in the distance--nothing but the undulation of sere
grass, sopped brown beneath the huge blackish oak-trees, and whence arose,
from all sides, a vague disconsolate bleating. At last the road made a
sudden bend, and disclosed what was evidently the home of my sitter. It
was not what I had expected. In a dip in the ground a large red-brick
house, with the rounded gables and high chimney-stacks of the time of
James I.,--a forlorn, vast place, set in the midst of the pasture-land,
with no trace of garden before it, and only a few large trees indicating