AFTERWARD January 1910
I
"Oh, there IS one, of course, but you\'ll never know it."
The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a bright June
garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp perception of its latent
significance as she stood, in the December dusk, waiting for the lamps to
be brought into the library.
The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they sat at
tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very house of which the
library in question was the central, the pivotal "feature." Mary Boyne and
her husband, in quest of a country place in one of the southern or
southwestern counties, had, on their arrival in England, carried their
problem straight to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it in her own
case; but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously, several
practical and judicious suggestions that she threw it out: "Well, there\'s
Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo\'s cousins, and you can get it for a
song."
The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms--its
remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water pipes, and
other vulgar necessities--were exactly those pleading in its favor with two
romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic drawbacks
which were associated, in their tradition, with unusual architectural
felicities.