Sir Randolph had retreated to his study. He was very fond of his study. His nineteenth-century ancestors had been rich land owners at a time when profits from agriculture were high. In 1868 – only a few years before the beginning of the agricultural decline from which the estate was still suffering – the Baronet of the time, Sir Randolph’s great-uncle, had had one or two improvements made to the house, until then a simple, early-Georgian manor. The improvements had included a new and more portentous entrance – a pillared portico leading into a high and frequently icy hall – and a wing to one side of it containing a billiard room, the study and a gun room, with servants’ quarters and bachelors’ bedrooms above. Sir Randolph complained a good deal about the wing. He said it made the house too big, and he ought to pull it down. Minnie objected to this idea on the grounds that it would make entertaining no fun at all – there would be hardly any room for visitors, let alone visitors’ servants – and Sir Randolph allowed it to be thought that his failure to put into practice his ruthlessly efficient plan was because he did not want to upset Minnie. The true reason was that he would have hated to lose his study.

It was a smallish room, high-ceilinged and panelled half way up the walls with dark oak. The patterned wallpaper was dark too, but not much of it was to be seen because of the number of pictures hanging on it and the massive oak superstructure above the fireplace which incorporated two mantel-shelves with small supporting pillars at their sides. The shelves were crowded with a variety of objects and ornaments, and above them the carved and fluted wood allowed for an inset oval picture lit on each side by hinged candelabra. This picture, like most of those on the walls, was – only just discernibly for the pictures too were dark – a landscape with figures. This one, unlike the others which though age and tobacco-smoking owners had obscured them were by such painters as Zucharelli and George Morland, was the work of an amateur. Sir Randolph’s great-aunt, an artist of considerable skill, had copied it in oils in the spring of 1864, when she and her husband had spent three months in Venice. It showed a man on a horse looking down into a sort of quarry where a woman was sitting, drapped in a cloak. The horse held one leg up in front of it as if about to paw the ground, wanting to be off, and the man seemed to hesitate, and behind them to the right was a group of buildings on a hill, very solid, a large farm perhaps, and on the other side a vast and various distance stretched towards a pale sky, becoming a deep shadowy blue as it approached the horizon. It was a picture which once looked at – for the dark varnish Great-Aunt Hannah had applied had darkened even more with the years and not everyone did look – seemed to draw the spectator by some kind of infinite and mysterious significance. Sir Randolph had never troubled to find out what it was supposed to represent or who had painted the original. He liked it as he liked certain pieces of music and would have hated to have had it moved, cleaned or elucidated.