‘What’s your price?’ repeated Mrs Leroy. ‘Or isn’t this house for sale, either?’

‘Seven thousand,’ Horace said; and, in a frisk of derision, he added, ‘guineas.’

Watching her face, where arrogance gradually overcame astonishment and fury, he realized that he was trapped. Or was he saved? Seven thousand guineas was more than 231double the figure concluded on for Box Cottage, and some two thousand above Mr Bond’s most hopeful estimate of what might be got for Bendish Hall. Allowing, and amply, for legal expenses—say three thousand four hundred guineas to call his own, as much his own as the leaves drifting from the lime-tree clump. Noiseless guineas seemed to be falling round him as he followed Mrs Leroy downstairs and looked his last at the fleshpots he had sold for a mess of lime blossom. She did not spend above a couple of minutes re-examining her purchase; in fact, she seemed to be in rather a hurry to get away from it. But purchase it was; the hardening of stubborn arrogance he had watched on her face assured him of that, even before she said, ‘Consider it mine, Mr Winterton,’ and told him the very expensive address of her lawyer.

The front door closed behind them, and outside it was almost a spring evening—so nearly that Basil’s little pretext of mopping his forehead as he turned to scrutinize Mrs Leroy was respectably convincing.

Mrs Leroy got into her car with such speed that Horace had to call after her, ‘I say! Do you mind taking me back?’

The word he said was back, not home. Was he saved, or was he trapped? If it had not been for that one abandoned moment looking down from the attic window, there could not be this doubt in his mind nor this embarrassing sensation that he was returning to live and die in his rightful house as though he were returning to a stern, high-lineaged harridan of a wife after a clandestine amour with a kind middle-aged woman of the middle classes. Calm as a tortoise, Basil had 232resumed work. Basil would not like this turn of events. But Ursula would like it even less. The massive, unquestionable bulk of Ursula’s disapprobation, and her further disapprobation when she met Mrs Leroy (he would see to that), loomed up through Horace’s doubts and uncertainties as gratifyingly as the Rock of Gibraltar.

233

The Reredos

Nowadays, the Church of England is somewhat prim about the extra-rubrical ornaments of its sacred edifices. Memorial windows, altar frontals, new pulpits for old—all must pass a censorship before they can be allowed in; even such trifles as hassocks have to comply with a doctrinal standard. It was otherwise in the days when Queen Victoria was in the last glow of her Indian summer and Florence Larpent in her prime. There was more latitude then. The Church of England was broader and took a broader view, and when Florence’s husband, Geoffrey Larpent, D.D., retired from a university professorship to the college living of Woodham Garnish, it did not cross her mind, or anyone else’s, that the parish church could be anything but improved by her improvements.