Hawtrey's Deputy by Harold Bindloss

Next evening Wyllard sat with Mrs. Radcliffe in a big low-ceilinged room at Garside Scar, looking about him with quiet interest. He had now and then spent a day or two in huge Western hotels, but he had never seen anything quite like that room. The sheer physical comfort of its arrangements appealed to him, but after all he was not one who had ever studied his bodily ease very much, and what he regarded as the chaste refinement of its adornment had a deeper effect. Though he had lived for the most part in the bush and on the prairie, he had been endued with or had somehow acquired an artistic susceptibility.

The furniture was old, and perhaps a trifle shabby, but it was, as he noticed, of beautiful design. Curtains, carpets, tinted walls, formed, it seemed to him, a harmony of soft colouring, and there were scattered here and there dainty works of art, little statuettes from Italy, and wonderful Indian ivory and silver work. Then a row of low, stone-ribbed windows pierced the front of the room, and looking out he saw the trim garden lying in the warm evening light. Immediately beneath the windows ran a broad gravelled terrace, which was apparently raked smooth every day, with a row of urns in which hyacinths bloomed upon its pillared wall. From the middle of it a wide stairway led down to the wonderful velvet lawn, which was dotted with clumps of cupressus with golden gleams in it, and beyond that clipped yews rose smooth and solid as a rampart of stone.