"I'm going now," he said rising. "If you had favoured me with the name of your house I might have dropped in on you some day from my balloon."
This sounded rather interesting.
"One Tree Cottage," we said together.
He laughed.
"Might have known it would be a cottage. You both look so exactly like a cottage—lattice windows, roses and honeysuckle thrown in. Quite common-place, if you only knew it."
"Good afternoon, sir," said Dimbie in an extinguishing voice.
The stranger smiled good-humouredly.
"Now you're going to get offended with me," said he, "and I am sorry. But you take my word for it, there are scores of young couples in lattice-windowed cottages—or would like to be in lattice-windowed cottages—with honeysuckle and roses and a baby. It's the craze now to live in a cottage. We avoided them as you would the plague in my young days—insanitary, stuffy, no gas, no hot water, floors with hills in them, walls with mould in them, skirtings with rats in them. Yours is like that, I expect."
We vouchsafed no reply.
"And your drains—I expect they're all wrong. Most cottage drains are abominable."