As Vickers stood rather apart from the others, who were strolling about the terrace, and looked at Dog Mountain, the only perfectly familiar feature in the scene, Isabella tucked her arm under his and led him towards the gardens:—
"Vick, I want you to see what I have done. Don't you think it's much better? I am not altogether satisfied." She glanced back at the long facade: "I think I should have done better with Herring rather than Osgood. But when we started to alter the old place, I didn't mean to do so much to it."
Isabelle knew more now than when Osgood had been engaged, two years before, and Herring's reputation had meanwhile quite overshadowed the older architect's.
"I told Isabelle at the start," said Cairy, who joined them, "she had better pull the old place down, and have a fresh deal. You had to come to it practically in the end?" He turned to Isabelle teasingly.
"Yes," she admitted half regretfully; "that's the way I always do a thing,—walk backwards into it, as John says. But if we had built from the ground up, it wouldn't have been this place, I suppose…. And I don't see why we did it,—Grafton is so far from anything."
"It's neither Tuxedo nor Lenox," Cairy suggested.
"Just plain Connecticut. Well, you see the Colonel left the place to me,—that was the reason."
And also the fact that he had left her only a small portion of his fortune besides. It was an ironical rebuke for his act that much of the small fortune he had given her had gone to transform his beloved Farm into something he would never have recognized. Vickers thought sadly, "If the old Colonel's ghost should haunt this terrace, he couldn't find his way about!"
"But it's snug and amusing,—the Farm? Isn't it?" Cairy demanded of Vickers in a consoling manner.
"I shouldn't call it snug," Vickers replied, unconsciously edging away from the Southerner, "nor wholly amusing!"