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great quantity of early Victorian furniture. The will was written two days after her quarrel with the eccentric old woman, and the terms of it certainly achieved the three purposes for which it was designed: it occasioned the utmost surprise to all concerned, heaped coals of fire on Miss Ley's indifferent head, and caused the bitterest disappointment and vexation to all that bore the name of Dwarris.

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    I T did not take Miss Ley very long to settle in her house. To its new owner, who hated modernity with all her heart, part of the charm lay in its quaint old fashion: built in the reign of Queen Anne, it had the leisurely, spacious comfort of dwelling-places in that period, with a hood over the door that was a pattern of elegance, wrought-iron railings, and, to Miss Ley's especial delight, extinguishers for the link-boys' torches.
    The rooms were large, somewhat low-pitched, with wide windows
    overlooking the most consciously beautiful of all the London parks. Miss Ley
    made no great alterations. An epicurean to her finger-tips, for many years
    the passion for liberty had alone disturbed the equanimity of her indolent
    temper. But to secure freedom, entire and absolute freedom, she was ever ready
    to make any sacrifice: ties affected her with a discomfort that seemed really
    akin to physical pain, and she avoided them – ties of family or of affection,
    ties of habit or of thought – with all the strenuousness of which she
    was capable. She had taken care never in the course of her life to cumber
    herself with chattels, and once, with a courage in which there was surely
    something heroic, feeling that she became too much attached to her belongings
    – cabinets and exquisite fans brought from Spain, Florentine frames
    of gilded wood and English mezzotints, Neapolitan bronzes, tables and settees
    discovered in out-of-the-way parts of France – she had sold everything.
    She would not risk to grow so fond of her home that it was a pain to leave
    it; she preferred to remain a wayfarer, sauntering through life with a heart
    keen to detect beauty, and a mind, open and unbiased, ready to laugh at the
    absurd. So it fitted her humour to move with the few goods which she possessed
    into her cousin's house as though it were but a furnished lodging, remaining
    there still unfettered; and when Death came – a pagan youth, twin brother
    to Sleep, rather than the grim and bony skeleton of Christian faith –
    ready to depart like a sated reveller, smiling dauntlessly and without regret.
    A new and personal ordering, the exclusion of many pieces of clumsy taste,
    gave Miss Ley's drawing-room quickly a more graceful and characteristic air:
    the objets dart collected since the memorable sale added a certain
    grave delicacy to the arrangement; and her friends noticed without surprise
    that, as in her own flat, the straight, carved chair was set between two windows,
    and the furniture deliberately placed so that from it the mistress of the
    house, herself part of the aesthetic scheme, could command and manipulate
    her guests.
     
    No sooner was Miss Ley comfortably settled than she wrote to an old friend and distant cousin, Algernon Langton, Dean of Tercanbury, asking him to bring his daughter to visit her new house; and Miss Langton replied that they would be pleased to come, fixing a certain Thursday morning for their arrival. Miss Ley greeted her relatives without effusion, for it was her whim to discourage manifestations of affection; but notwithstanding the good-humoured, polite contempt with which it was her practice to treat the clergy in general, she looked upon her cousin Algernon with real esteem.
    He was a tall old man, spare and bent, with very white hair and a pallid, almost transparent, skin; his eyes were cold and blue, but his expression singularly gentle. There was a dignity in his bearing, and at the same time an infinite graciousness which reminded you of those famous old ecclesiastics whose