Walking briskly, they came to a turn in the drive, the trees thinned out, and there before them stood the Villa Caprice.
There it stood among its dead and brambled lawns, with all its windows boarded up and a big, tough, tangled vine, leafless now, tied round and round the battlements, the turrets, and the gables like a giant's wrapping twine. Beyond the house the ragged hedges looked black, and the queer tree that was called a monkey-puzzle tree looked black, too, and bristling. The whole scene was shabby and forbidding.
"Oh, dear!" wailed Mrs. Blake. "I didn't remember it as being quite so—quite so—"
"Bleak," Mr. Blake supplied. "And this is what we called a bargain! We must have been out of our minds!"
Aunt Hilda, who wanted to be comforting, said: "You know, I think when you've got rid of that ghastly porch and ripped the boards off the windows, you'll feel very different about it."
But though she tried, she didn't really sound convinced, and Uncle Jake was seen to shake his head.
"The place looks like a training school for witches," Mr. Blake remarked in utmost gloom.
The children, however, refused to be disappointed and went running toward the house with briers snatching at their jeans and Julian clattering more than usual because of the buckets.
"I think it's suave," he assured Portia, as he jolted along beside her. "All it needs is fixing up. Heck, it hasn't been fixed up in fifty years! What do they expect?"
"I don't know," Portia said, feeling grateful to her cousin and indignant with her other relatives. "I think it's a perfectly wonderful house!"