The Coldstone Read Free Page A

sir?”
    â€œNo—I don’t think so. I don’t think I’ll have this room.”
    â€œIt’s the best room.”
    â€œI don’t think I should ever feel as if it were mine. Is there another room that looks up the hill? I’d like that.”
    He thought that Sir Jervis had liked it too; he could lie in bed and look across the brass knobs of the foot-rail at the green fields that climbed the hill, and the grey stones that broke the green.
    They went along the passage, through a door, up a step, and down three more. Anthony began to wonder how long it would take him to find his way about the house.
    Then Mrs. Hutchins flung open a thick oak door.
    â€œIt’s one of the old rooms, sir, if you don’t mind that.”
    He had to bend his head a little, because the doorposts were not quite six foot. The room pleased him immediately. It had panelling to about his own height, and then clean whitewash crossed with timber. Two heavy beams ran overhead, and all the narrow end of the room looked through a long casement at the green, tilted fields. The bed was a four-poster stripped of its curtains, the fluted posts as bare and graceful as winter trees. On the floor a faded Persian carpet, and the bare oak boards polished and blackened by the passing feet of many generations.
    â€œI’ll have this room,” said Anthony with decision.

CHAPTER THREE
    An hour later he stepped across the village street to pay his respects to the Miss Colstones. The Ladies’ House had a little square paved garden in front of it; there was a low stone wall, and a high stone gate. The house itself crossed the back of the garden and sent out two wings that enclosed it. There was a square bed of scarlet geraniums in each corner of the paved place, and a round bed, with a large lavender bush and an incongruous edging of lobelia, in the middle. The path led up to the round bed, divided in two to encircle it, and then ran straight up to a worn grey step and a dark green door.
    Anthony was shown into a white panelled room with a glass door open to a miniature lawn. On either side of the door there were casement windows very deeply recessed. He stood in the middle of the pale flowered carpet and looked about him. The furniture exhibited a pleasing mixture of periods. There were three gimcrack gilt Empire chairs, some dignified oak, a round table with a wreath of flowers inlaid upon its edge and a marvellous erection of wax fruit under a glass shade standing in the middle of it, flanked by photograph albums with gold clasps and edges. One of the albums was bound in crimson plush, and the other in faded red morocco. Over the fireplace a lady in a ruff looked sadly at her own long thin fingers, her hair drawn tightly back beneath a jewelled cap, her eyebrows raised in strained interrogation.
    The door opened, and there came in a little lady, very point device, with pretty white hair rolled back over a cushion, and scraps of old lace at the neck and wrists of her mourning gown. She had a wisp of a white Shetland shawl about her shoulders. Her eyes were a clear pale blue, her cheeks round and pink, her mouth the cupid’s bow of a Victorian book of beauty. She had pretty little hands and pretty little feet, and a fluttered manner that was pretty too in its suggestion of timid welcome. The small outstretched hand trembled just perceptibly.
    Anthony took it, and found it cold.
    He said, “How do you do, Miss Colstone?”
    â€œOh, not Miss Colstone! Indeed I hope you will call us Cousin. And I am not Miss Colstone—I am Miss Arabel—your Cousin Arabel. Agatha is Miss Colstone, and—won’t you sit down?”
    He chose one of the stronger chairs, moving it nearer to the frail gilt sofa with its faded brocade cushions which made Miss Arabel’s cashmere look so dead a black.
    She gazed at him earnestly and said,
    â€œYou are not at all like dear Papa. Did you have a pleasant journey? We would