They came not only next day but the day after, and the day after that. Charlie, a huge hairy man, only one degree less obstinate than his father, consented after some persuasion to an agreement being drawn up by a Henley lawyer; promised Patricia that she should be “in” by the end of June; proposed ribbed papers, whites and creams and pale lemons for the walls, brown paint for this room, cream for that; suggested diffidently that if by any chance she were short of furniture, he could easily make “chairs and tables and sideboards and such like”—in proof of which he took her to his own thatched-roofed cottage, and showed her specimens of his work, fine solid stuff, chiselled simply and lovingly from the seasoned oaks and walnuts of which his timber-yard still held store. For Charlie Tebbits was craftsman by heritage.

But the village, apart from Charlie’s cottage and workshops, proved disappointing: most of the old cottages had been crowded out by jerry-built atrocities; a tin-roofed chapel, a pseudo-artistic public house, a “Recreation Room” (also of tin, but painted red), and a peculiarly offensive stucco school-house, betrayed all too clearly the trail of the urban serpent.

“Never mind, Pat,” consoled Francis. “You can hardly see it from Sunflowers.”

Church and vicarage stood, (as if fearing contamination, they had withdrawn themselves from these evidences of humanity), a full mile away on the road to Arlsfield Hall—a fine Georgian house, ring-fenced, among green vistas of parklands and woods much in need of the axe.

It was while circling Arlsfield Hall that Francis and Patricia found Mr. Tebbits’ second “house”—a straggling cottage, brown-roofed and mellow-walled. The cottage lay in a hollow of the road. Woods crept down to it from the west; eastwards, corn fields swelled to a fringe of spruce trees. South of it, lay the park of Arlsfield Hall; and north, a mile by the trodden short-cut across the pasture, Tebbits Farm and “Sunflowers.”

Exploring they found undulating corridors, quaint octagonal rooms, panelled in age-dark oak, and—at the top of a broad shallow stair-case, up which Francis scarcely needed Patricia’s arm—an enormous apartment, looking through huge windows clean across the park to sunlit hills.

“Lord, Pat,” exclaimed Francis, “a man could write here.”

He looked about the room, measuring with one of his sticks, the window-seat, the distance from window-seat to fireplace, the recesses on either side of the fireplace; pointing out where the desk should stand, where the bookcases.... And in that moment—though it took two more visits, the first accompanied by Charlie Tebbits, the second by Prout, before Francis eventually made up his mind—Patricia knew that she would not be neighbourless at Sunflowers....