A Monk of Cruta by E. Phillips Oppenheim — Read

It was with a strange conflict of feelings that Paul, with Adrea by his side, passed across the square, low hall of the cottage, plentifully decorated with stags' heads and other sporting trophies, and into the drawing-room. It was a room which had been built, too, of quaint shape, made up of nooks and corners and recesses, and with dark oak beams stretching right across the ceiling. The furniture was all old-fashioned, and of different periods; but the general effect was harmonious, though a trifle shabby. Paul knew it well! Many an evening he had come in to tea there, after a cigar and a chat with the old Major, and lounged in that low chair by Mrs. Harcourt's side. But it scarcely seemed like the same room to him now. The Major and his wife had been old-fashioned people, and their personality, and talk, and surroundings, had created a sort of atmosphere which Paul had grown almost to associate with the place. He missed it directly he entered the room.

What it was that had worked the change it was hard to tell. Adrea had been far too charmed with its quaintness to seriously alter anything. A little stiffness in the arrangement of the furniture had been corrected, and the few antimacassars carefully removed; otherwise nothing had been changed. The great bowls of yellow roses and chrysanthemums, and the piles of modern books and music lying about, might have been partly responsible for it; and the faint perfume which he had grown to associate altogether with Adrea, and which seemed wafted into the air as she gathered up her skirts on her way into the room, had a foreign flavour in it. But, after all, it was Adrea herself who changed the atmosphere so completely. She was so different from other women in her strange Eastern beauty and the leopard-like grace of her movements that she could not fail to create an atmosphere around her. Yes!