the
staircase as he mounted, sounded in the grave rumble of the old bell, as little
electric as possible, of which Chad, at the door, had pulled the ancient but
neatly-kept tassel; it formed in short the clearest medium of its particular
kind that he had ever breathed. He would have answered for it at the end of a
quarter of an hour that some of the glass cases contained swords and epaulettes
of ancient colonels and generals; medals and orders once pinned over hearts that
had long since ceased to beat; snuffboxes bestowed on ministers and envoys;
copies of works presented, with inscriptions, by authors now classic. At bottom
of it all for him was the sense of her rare unlikeness to the women he had
known. This sense had grown, since the day before, the more he recalled her, and
had been above all singularly fed by his talk with Chad in the morning.
Everything in fine made her immeasurably new, and nothing so new as the old
house and the old objects. There were books, two or three, on a small table near
his chair, but they hadn't the lemon-coloured covers with which his eye had
begun to dally from the hour of his arrival and to the opportunity of a further
acquaintance with which he had for a fortnight now altogether succumbed. On
another table, across the room, he made out the great Revue; but even that
familiar face, conspicuous in Mrs. Newsome's parlours, scarce counted here as a
modern note. He was sure on the spot - and he afterwards knew he was right -
that this was a touch of Chad's own hand. What would Mrs. Newsome say to the
circumstance that Chad's interested influence kept her paper-knife in the Revue?
The interested influence at any rate had, as we say, gone straight to the point
- had in fact soon left it quite behind.
    She was seated, near the fire, on a small stuffed and fringed chair, one of
the few modern articles in the room; and she leaned back in it with her hands
clasped in her lap and no movement, in all her person, but the fine prompt play
of her deep young face. The fire, under the low white marble, undraped and
academic, had burnt down to the silver ashes of light wood; one of the windows,
at a distance, stood open to the mildness and stillness, out of which, in the
short pauses, came the faint sound, pleasant and homely, almost rustic, of a
plash and a clatter of