The house itself had been built in a quaint, three-sided fashion, the central portion and the two wings which flanked it rectangularly serving to enclose a sunk lawn round which ran a wide, flagged path. A low, grey stone wall, facing the sea, fenced the fourth side of the square, at one end of which a gate gave egress on to the sea-bitten grassy slope that led to the edge of the cliff itself.
A grove of trees half-girdled the house, and this, together with the sheltering upward trend of the downs on one side of it, tempered the violence of the fierce winds which sometimes swept the coast-line even in summer.
Behind the house, under the lee of the rising upland, lay the gardens of Mallow, witness to the loving care of generations. Stretches of lawn, coolly green and shaven, sloped away from a terrace which ran the whole length of the house, meeting the gravelled drive as it curved past the house-door. Beyond lay dim sweet alleys, over-arched by trees, and below, where a sudden dip in the configuration of the land admitted of it, were grassy terraces, gay with beds of flowers, linked together by short flights of grass-grown steps.
"I can't understand why you spend so much time in stuffy old London,
Kitty, when you have this heavenly place to come to."
Nan spoke from a nest of half-a-dozen cushions heaped together beneath the shade of a tree. Here she was lounging luxuriously, smoking innumerable Turkish cigarettes, while Kitty swung tranquilly in a hammock close by. Penelope had been invisible since lunch time. They had all been down at Mallow the better part of a month, and she and Ralph Fenton quite frequently absented themselves, "hovering," as Barry explained, "on the verge of an engagement."
"My dear, the longer I stay in town, the more thoroughly I enjoy the country when we come here. I get the quintessence of enjoyment by treating Mallow as a liqueur."
Nan laughed. There was a faint flavour of bitterness in her laughter.
"Practically most of our good times in this world are only to be obtained in the liqueur form. The gods don't make a habit of offering you a big jug of enjoyment."
"If they did, you'd be certain to refuse it because you didn't like the shape of the jug!" retorted Kitty.
Nan smiled whole-heartedly.