In Which a Lonely Wayfarer Becomes Monarch of All He Surveys; and in Which One Who Might Have Been Presented as the Hero of This Tale is Forced, Through No Fault of His Own, to Take His Chances With the Rest

When Roger Poole came a week later to the big house on the hill, it was
on a rainy day. He carried his own bag, and was let in at the lower
door by Susan Jenks.

Her smiling brown face gave him at once a sense of homeyness. She led
the way through the wide hall and up the front stairs, crisp and
competent in her big white apron and black gown.

As he followed her, Roger was aware that the house had lost its
effulgence. The flowers were gone, and the radiance, and the stairs
that the silken ladies had once ascended showed, at closer range,
certain signs of shabbiness. The carpet was old and mended. There was
a chilliness about the atmosphere, as if the fire, too, needed mending.

But when Susan Jenks opened the door of the Tower Room, he was met by
warmth and brightness. Here was the light of leaping flames and of a
low-shaded lamp. On the table beside the lamp was a pot of pink
hyacinths, and their fragrance made the air sweet. The inner room was
no longer a rosy bower, but a man's retreat, with its substantial
furniture, its simplicity, its absence of non-essentials. In this room
Roger set down his bag, and Susan Jenks, hanging big towels and little
ones in the bathroom, drawing the curtains, and coaxing the fire,
flitted cozily back and forth for a few minutes and then withdrew.