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And yet when it did open and she saw in the doorway the cheerful rosy face of the young footman (brought up probably from the place in Wiltshire), and behind him the dark stony hall so familiar to her with its vast silly-faced clock, its red picture of an eighteenth-century Romney, its dark shadows and dusky piece of tapestry, she was at home. Cold, shabby, echoing house, so bare and naked here, so overcrowded there, so destitute of all taste and artistic feeling and yet with so strong a personality, so untouched by new crazes, fashions and habits, and yet so threatening in its survival to the flimsiness of this chaotic post-war age—she understood it, she knew how to approach it, she belonged to it as she could never belong to Clara Paget's black and yellow bedroom or Althea Bendersley's drawing-room of cubist reds and blues.

In the dusk of the hall Hignett waited—Hignett, stout, round-faced, impersonal, thick in the legs, back, and brain, reactionary, snob, drawing-room slave and kitchen tyrant, faithful, conceited, ill-educated, intolerant, perfect servant and loyal friend of his master. And of his master's son. His face lighted when he saw Wildherne as it but seldom lighted for anyone. The Duke, Wildherne, his own child Thomas Edward (aged eight) were for him the three perfect beings. He despised women (his wife most emphatically included), all other servants; he hated Socialists, Bolshevists, Communists, and the clergy. He had no friends. He wanted none. He had saved a large sum of money, but he would never retire until Wildherne, in his own time as Duke, dismissed him.