The cottage was an unpretentious little place on the borders of Chippingholt, where the orchards began to stretch toward the woods. Scarse was not well off, and had been fortunate enough to obtain it at quite a nominal rental. He kept a cook and one housemaid, both of whom Brenda looked after; and despite his slender means, his style of living was in every way refined. The largest room in the house had been turned into a study, and here Brenda now found her father buried in blue-books, pamphlets and newspapers.
Scarse was a lean, tall anæmic-looking creature. His hair was quite white, his pallid and wrinkled face clean-shaven, and his whole aspect was one of peevishness and querulousness. In spite of the warmth he had ordered a fire to be lighted, and, wrapped in a llama wool dressing-gown, he crouched over it with the Daily Mail spread out upon his knees. He looked ill and cross, and seemed terribly feeble. Brenda was more than ever certain, now that she saw him, that Harold had been mistaken in thinking it was he whom he had met. He looked, she thought, more fit for bed than for walking.
"Come in, come in," he said in his thin, cantankerous voice. "Shut the door, Brenda; there is quite a draught."
"Are you no better, father?" she asked, coming toward him and taking his hand. Scarse snatched it away.
"Not a bit, my dear. This thing has a hold of me--I am aching all over. Of course it comes just to prevent my speaking at the Trafalgar Square meeting next week!"
"You can send an excuse."
"I can't and I won't," snapped her father. "This paper shows me how necessary it is for all men to protest against this unjust war, which has been forced upon the Boers. I must speak in favor of that honest, God-fearing band of farmers, who are in danger of being crushed by a capitalist war. I want to see Van Zwieten about this article. It is perfectly scandalous. Where is he?"
"I don't know. I've not seen him all the afternoon."
"Is that the way you attend to your guests?"
"He is no guest of mine," cried Brenda, indignantly. "I can't bear the man. His mere presence is most objectionable to me."