north, retiring at sixty that he might enjoy some of those pleasures of life for which business had left him too little time.  One of these pleasures was building.  Henry Marsham had spent ten years in building Tallyn, and at the end of that time, feeling it impossible to live in the huge incoherent place he had created, he hired a small villa at Nice and went to die there in privacy and peace.  Nevertheless, his will laid strict injunctions upon his widow to inhabit and keep up Tallyn; injunctions backed by considerable sanctions of a financial kind.  His will, indeed, had been altogether a document of some eccentricity; though as eight years had now elapsed since his death, the knowledge of its provisions possessed by outsiders had had time to grow vague.  Still, there were strong general impressions abroad, and as Alicia Drake surveyed the house which the old man had built to be the incubus of his descendants, some of them teased her mind.  It was said, for instance, that Oliver Marsham and his sister only possessed pittances of about a thousand a year apiece, while Tallyn, together with the vast bulk of Henry Marsham’s fortune, had been willed to Lady Lucy, and lay, moreover, at her absolute disposal.  Was this so, or no?  Miss Drake’s curiosity, for some time past, would have been glad to be informed.

Meanwhile, here was the house—­about which there was no mystery—­least of all, as to its cost.  Interminable broad corridors, carpeted with ugly Brussels and suggesting a railway hotel, branched out before Miss Drake’s eyes in various directions; upon them opened not bedrooms but “suites,” as Mr. Marsham pere had loved to call them, of which the number was legion, while the bachelors’ wing alone would have lodged a regiment.  Every bedroom was like every other, except for such variations as Tottenham Court Road, rioting at will, could suggest.  Copies in marble or bronze of well-known statues ranged along the corridors—­a forlorn troupe of nude and shivering divinities.  The immense hall below, with its violent frescos and its brand-new Turkey carpets, was panelled in oak, from which some device of stain or varnish had managed to abstract every particle of charm.  A whole oak wood, indeed, had been lavished on the swathing and sheathing of the house, With the only result that the spectator beheld it steeped in a repellent yellow-brown from top to toe, against which no ornament, no piece of china, no picture, even did they possess some individual beauty, could possibly make it prevail.

And the drawing-room!  As Alicia Drake advanced alone into its empty and blazing magnificence she could only laugh in its face—­so eager and restless was the effort which it made, and so hopeless the defeat.  Enormous mirrors, spread on white and gold walls; large copies from Italian pictures, collected by Henry Marsham in Rome; more facile statues holding innumerable lights; great pieces of modern china painted with realistic roses and poppies; crimson carpets, gilt furniture, and flaring cabinets—­Miss Drake frowned as she looked at it.  “What could be done with it?” she said to herself, walking slowly up and down, and glancing from side to side—­“What could be done with it?”