Involuntarily he lowered his voice. "It's the first time I've ever been in a very old house," he said, as if announcing something of importance.

"A very old house? The Willows?" The idea seemed a new one to her. "Well—after all, everything is relative, as what's-his-name said."

"Don't you call it a very old house?"

She wrinkled her dark eyebrows in an effort of memory. "Let me see. Father's great-uncle Ambrose Lorburn built it, I believe. When would that be?" She began to count on her fingers. "Say about 1830. Well, that does make it very nearly an old house for America, doesn't it? Almost a hundred years!"

"And the same folks always lived in it?"

"Oh, of course." She seemed surprised at the question. "The present owner is the first absentee—poor Cousin Tom! He thinks he ought to live here, but he says he can't come up to scratch. So he makes up for it by keeping everything unchanged." Again she surveyed the plaintive shadowy room. "I suppose," she mused, "the house will be getting to have an archaeological interest of its own before long. It must be one of the best specimens of Hudson River Bracketed that are left, even in our ultra-conservative neighbourhood."

To Vance she seemed still to be speaking another language, of which he caught only an occasional phrase, and even that but half comprehensible.

"Hudson River Bracketed?" he echoed. "What's that?"