Charlie Tebbits, faithless to all traditions of the building trade, kept his promised date; and Patricia moved into Sunflowers by the end of June. She “moved in” without servants or children; assisted only by a great grenadier of a woman who came from Arlsfield Village just too late to prepare breakfast and left just too early to prepare dinner. But Patricia had been homeless eighteen months, long enough to revel even in the discomforts of home-making—scamped meals, chairs without loose-covers, curtainless windows, floor-boards minus carpets, workmen all day and solitude all night.

The more she grew to know this house she had fallen in love with, the more she fell in love with it. Compared to Lowndes Square, Sunflowers was tiny—she loved it for its tininess. Sunflowers possessed no second staircase—she found she had never really approved of second staircases. Sunflowers had no wine-cellar—she decided wine-cellars inevitably harboured black-beetles. All through ten unhampered days, she delivered herself up, hand and brain, to this new infatuation.

Still, infatuation apart, it really was a jolly house; and by the time that Charlie Tebbits, assisted by Harry Tebbits, old man Tebbits, Miss Tebbits, and an amazing handyman from Little Arlsfield, had laid carpets, tacked down linoleum, hung curtains, arranged old furniture and carried up new; Patricia could honestly look round and say to herself: “This is just how I planned things the day I first saw it.”

She spent a whole twenty-four hours wandering from the berugged cream-papered hall into Peter’s little study, (for which Charlie Tebbits was still making her walnut bookshelves to match Peter’s writing-table), through the dining-room and the servants’ quarters; up the balustered dark-blue-carpeted staircase, (stopping always to look out from the window-seat on the half-landing) to the nurseries, gay with Cecil Aldin hunting-friezes, with chintz curtains and shiny white furniture; and from there (giving only a casual glance at the spare room) into her own bedroom and Peter’s dressing-room—white-papered both, both looking out across the orchard towards the river.

Her own room, except for the blue carpet saved from the cupidity of M. Van Woumen, contained no relics of Lowndes Square: the low gray-painted Empire bedstead of carved wood and basket-work, she had “looted” from her father’s house in Harley Street; Tebbits’ ingenuity provided flounced dressing-table to match; artfully enclosed wall-spaces evaded the difficulties of a wardrobe; the fireplace (as all the fireplaces at Sunflowers) was of irreproachable white tilework, devoid of unnecessary brass and iron. But Peter’s dressing-room contained all Peter’s own familiar furniture—his mahogany bow-fronted wardrobe, his brass bedstead, the glass-doored wall-case of guns and hunting-crops and fishing-rods, his collection of hunting prints.

“He must like the place,” she kept saying to herself, “he will like it.”

For Sunflowers represented—though Patricia would never have admitted the fact—her last bid for Peter’s love. Their house in Lowndes Square had been a ready-made residence, full of Peter’s inherited chattels: entering it, she too had become his chattel—mere Mrs. Jameson. Whereas Sunflowers was of her own finding, her own creating; the house she, Patricia, would make “home” for her man against his return from the wars.