She did not even notice that Horace was silent.

When he rose to his feet, she did not notice that, either. Blind to all but the future, she said between smoke rings that she could see the sun pouring in at every window and that she couldn’t exist without sun.

‘There won’t be much more of it to-day,’ said Horace. ‘Time we were going.’

‘Going?’

‘Going to look over the house.’

‘But I’ve seen the house already,’ Mrs Leroy said.

‘No, you haven’t. Not the house that’s for sale.’229

‘Do you mean to say that all this time I’ve been here for nothing? That this isn’t—that you aren’t—Then why on earth did you show me all over it?’

‘It seemed to interest you,’ said Horace. ‘I’m sorry there isn’t time to show you the garden too. I should have liked your advice—especially about the corner where all the family dogs are buried. But now I really think we should be off.’

Bemused and suspicious, Mrs Leroy entered Box Cottage without a spark of prophetic fire, and at first would only glance and grunt. Lumpishly following him from room to room, she ignored his showmanship of bedroom basins, south aspects, and serving-hatches, and devoted herself to looking censoriously into cupboards or disparagingly at power plugs. She’s doing it deliberately, he thought. The spiteful bitch! She means to keep me here kicking my heels while she goes round looking for things to be unpleasant about. I shall certainly catch another cold. Probably I shall die. Bendish will be sold by auction, she’ll buy it cheap and cut down all the timber. Pray God I may haunt her!

‘And that is all,’ he said, ‘unless you would like to see the attic.’ Mrs Leroy said she might as well.

In the attic, it was even colder, and quite startlingly unfurnished. ‘Nice and roomy,’ Horace said. Mrs Leroy did not answer. She rushed wolfishly to the cistern and began to claw at the lagging. Horace turned to look out of the window. Basil was working in the garden, raking a newly dug bed, with a seed packet stuck into his hatband. Basil, with no sentiment at all, had transferred all his affection to 230the easy, friable loam of the new garden, its good concrete paths with no finicking box edgings to harbour slugs. A line of autumn-sown peas was already breaking green and whiskered with twigs, the first row of broad beans stood a couple of inches high. Noticing this, Horace felt a sudden stirring of ownerly warmth toward Box Cottage. Slighted by Mrs Leroy, all its merits became real to him: its trimness, its modest worth, its sound floors and draught-proof windows, its warrant of warmth and comfort and ease with dignity. As though infected by Mrs Leroy, he saw himself there; and what he saw looked very tolerable.

At a sound of scratching, he turned about. A mouse would be positively welcome, a rat inestimable—all women run from rats. But the rodent was Mrs Leroy, who was now on her knees behind the cistern, attempting to dig her purple nails into the floor boards. She’s mad, he thought. God help me, I shall have to humour her. For, never before having encountered a serious buyer, he did not recognize the symptoms. When she desisted from what he decided must be a wistful necrophilia, got up, smacked her knees, and advanced on him, saying, ‘Well, Mr Winterton, what’s your price?’ he feigned not to hear her.