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"Not so often as you think."

She could see lodge gates a few yards on. Her time with him was running out in seconds.

"Perhaps you'll take me to the pictures one day."

"Should you like me to take you?"

"I've said so, haven't I?"

"Well, then, perhaps someday. But I warn you I'm not a movie-fiend. And now here we are at Doleham Manor. Isn't it a fine old place?"

6

Sylvia Dunning was out by nearly two hundred years when she settled the Bullens at Doleham in Queen Elizabeth's day. A family called Cheynell had owned it then and kept it until 1761, when the Bullens took it over, foreclosing on a mortgage. It was they who had given it its present classical frontage, which on clear days from as far off as Sandlake could be seen gleaming among the woods like a white stone. They had thought it essential to cover up the scrambled mess of Tudor and Stuart buildings which for centuries had been growing and crumbling on the site. But they had done no more than cover. Out of the pillared Georgian portico one stepped into a beamed Stuart hall, where old Italian furniture showed a strange congruity with its surroundings. Then, passing under a William and Mary staircase, one found oneself between narrow walls of Tudor linen-fold paneling, and then walked out into the very last construction of all—a Lutyens terrace and loggia, which Nigel Winrow had had built as a setting for the parties that in those days Iris was giving as part of her campaign to get Lesley married.