"Come—surely we can find other rooms."
"All the best ones are taken. There's nothing left that I'd care to live in…. Besides, it isn't rooms I want, Mr. Waddington, it's a house."
It was, of course, the Ballingers' cottage. But she couldn't have it.
She couldn't have it.
"I wouldn't mind how small it was. If only I had a little home of my own. You don't know, Mr. Waddington, what it is to be without a home of your own. I haven't had a home for years. Five years. Not since the war."
"I'm afraid," said Mr. Waddington, "at present there isn't a house for you in Wyck."
He brooded earnestly, as though he were trying to conjure up, to create out of nothing, a house for her and a home.
"No. But I understand that the Ballingers will be leaving in June. You said that at any time, if you had a house, I should have it."
"I said a house, Mrs. Levitt, not a cottage."
"It's all the same to me. The Ballingers' cottage could be made into an adorable little house."
"It could. With a few hundred pounds spent on it."