It was with a certain twinge of the conscience that Mr. Brumley perceived his visitor, but it speedily became clear that Sir Isaac had no knowledge of the guilty circumstances of the day before. He had come to buy Black Strand—incontinently, that was all. He was going, it became clear at once, to buy it with all its fittings and furnishings as it stood, lock, stock and barrel. Mr. Brumley, concealing that wild elation, that sense of a joyous rebirth, that only the liquidation of nearly all one’s possessions can give, was firm but not excessive. Sir Isaac haggled as a wave breaks and then gave in and presently they were making a memorandum upon the pretty writing-desk beneath the traditional rose Euphemia had established there when Mr. Brumley was young and already successful.
This done, and it was done in less than fifteen minutes, Sir Isaac produced a rather crumpled young architect from the motor-car as a conjurer might produce a rabbit from a hat, a builder from Aleham appeared astonishingly in a dog-cart—he had been summoned by telegram—and Sir Isaac began there and then to discuss alterations, enlargements and, more particularly, with a view to his nursery requirements, the conversion of the empty barn into a nursery wing and its connexion with the house by a corridor across the shrubbery.
“It will take you three months,” said the builder from Aleham. “And the worst time of the year coming.”
“It won’t take three weeks—if I have to bring down a young army from London to do it,” said Sir Isaac.
“But such a thing as plastering——”
“We won’t have plastering.”
“There’s canvas and paper, of course,” said the young architect.
“There’s canvas and paper,” said Sir Isaac. “And those new patent building units, so far as the corridor goes. I’ve seen the ads.”
“We can whitewash ’em. They won’t show much,” said the young architect.
“Oh if you do things in that way,” said the builder from Aleham with bitter resignation....