Then there was the poor old greenhouse, sagging in every slender timber, broken as to every other cobwebbed pane, empty and debased within; they could not bring themselves to enter here.
Last of all there was the summer schoolroom over the boat-house, quite apart from the house itself; scene of such safe yet reckless revels; in its very aura late Victorian!
It lay hidden in ivy at the end of a now neglected path; the bow-windows overlooking the river were framed in ivy, like three matted, whiskered, dirty, happy faces; one, with its lower sash propped open by a broken plant-pot, might have been grinning a toothless welcome to two once leading spirits of the place.
Cazalet whittled a twig and wedged that sash up altogether; then he sat himself on the sill, his long legs inside. But his knife had reminded him of his plug tobacco. And his plug tobacco took him as straight back to the bush as though the unsound floor had changed under their feet into a magic carpet.
"You simply have it put down to the man's account in the station books. Nobody keeps ready money up at the bush, not even the price of a plug like this; but the chap I'm telling you about (I can see him now, with his great red beard and freckled fists) he swore I was charging him for half a pound more than he'd ever had. I was station storekeeper, you see; it was quite the beginning of things, and I'd have had to pay the few bob myself, and be made to look so small that I shouldn't have had a soul to call my own on the run. So I fought him for the difference; we fought for twenty minutes behind the wood-heap; then he gave me best, but I had to turn in till I could see again."
"You don't mean that he—"
Blanche had looked rather disgusted the moment before; now she was all truculent suspense and indignation.
"Beat me?" he cried. "Good Lord, no; but there was none too much in it."
Fires died down in her hazel eyes, lay lambent as soft moonlight, flickered into laughter before he had seen the fire.