Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trains⁠—the few that there were⁠—stopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, ...

He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take. All was quiet; Denis wandered from room to empty room, looking with pleasure at the familiar pictures and furniture, at all the little untidy sign...

The terrace in front of the house was a long narrow strip of turf, bounded along its outer edge by a graceful stone balustrade. Two little summerhouses of brick stood at either end. Below the house th...

Denis woke up next morning to find the sun shining, the sky serene. He decided to wear white flannel trousers⁠—white flannel trousers and a black jacket, with a silk shirt and his new peach-coloured t...

Mr. Wimbush had taken them to see the sights of the Home Farm, and now they were standing, all six of them⁠—Henry Wimbush, Mr. Scogan, Denis, Gombauld, Anne, and Mary⁠—by the low wall of the piggery, ...

Mr. Barbecue-Smith arrived in time for tea on Saturday afternoon. He was a short and corpulent man, with a very large head and no neck. In his earlier middle age he had been distressed by this absence...

At Crome all the beds were ancient hereditary pieces of furniture. Huge beds, like four-masted ships, with furled sails of shining coloured stuff. Beds carved and inlaid, beds painted and gilded. Beds...

Breakfast on Sunday morning was an hour later than on weekdays, and Priscilla, who usually made no public appearance before luncheon, honoured it by her presence. Dressed in black silk, with a ruby cr...

Mr. Bodiham was sitting in his study at the Rectory. The nineteenth-century Gothic windows, narrow and pointed, admitted the light grudgingly; in spite of the brilliant July weather, the room was somb...

Denis did not dance, but when ragtime came squirting out of the pianola in gushes of treacle and hot perfume, in jets of Bengal light, then things began to dance inside him. Little black nigger corpus...

Mr. Barbecue-Smith was gone. The motor had whirled him away to the station; a faint smell of burning oil commemorated his recent departure. A considerable detachment had come into the courtyard to spe...

“Blight, Mildew, and Smut⁠ ⁠…” Mary was puzzled and distressed. Perhaps her ears had played her false. Perhaps what he had really said was, “Squire, Binyon, and Shanks,” or “Childe, Blunden, and Earp,...

Henry Wimbush brought down with him to dinner a budget of printed sheets loosely bound together in a cardboard portfolio. “Today,” he said, exhibiting it with a certain solemnity, “today I have finish...

For their after-luncheon coffee the party generally adjourned to the library. Its windows looked east, and at this hour of the day it was the coolest place in the whole house. It was a large room, fit...

“In the time of the amiable Brantôme,” Mr. Scogan was saying, “every debutante at the French Court was invited to dine at the King’s table, where she was served with wine in a handsome silver cup of I...

The ladies had left the room and the port was circulating. Mr. Scogan filled his glass, passed on the decanter, and, leaning back in his chair, looked about him for a moment in silence. The conversati...

Ivor brought his hands down with a bang on to the final chord of his rhapsody. There was just a hint in that triumphant harmony that the seventh had been struck along with the octave by the thumb of t...

The nearest Roman Catholic church was upwards of twenty miles away. Ivor, who was punctilious in his devotions, came down early to breakfast and had his car at the door, ready to start, by a quarter t...

Henry Wimbush’s long cigar burned aromatically. The History of Crome lay on his knee; slowly he turned over the pages. “I can’t decide what episode to read you tonight,” he said thoughtfully. “Sir Fer...

Ivor was gone. Lounging behind the windscreen in his yellow sedan he was whirling across rural England. Social and amorous engagements of the most urgent character called him from hall to baronial hal...

Perched on its four stone mushrooms, the little granary stood two or three feet above the grass of the green close. Beneath it there was a perpetual shade and a damp growth of long, luxuriant grasses....

For the sake of peace and quiet Denis had retired earlier on this same afternoon to his bedroom. He wanted to work, but the hour was a drowsy one, and lunch, so recently eaten, weighed heavily on body...

Gombauld was by no means so furious at their apparition as Denis had hoped and expected he would be. Indeed, he was rather pleased than annoyed when the two faces, one brown and pointed, the other rou...

It was noon. Denis, descending from his chamber, where he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular, found the drawing-room deserted. He was about to go out...

“I hope you all realise,” said Henry Wimbush during dinner, “that next Monday is Bank Holiday, and that you will all be expected to help in the Fair.” “Heavens!” cried Anne. “The Fair⁠—I had forgotten...

A little canvas village of tents and booths had sprung up, just beyond the boundaries of the garden, in the green expanse of the park. A crowd thronged its streets, the men dressed mostly in black⁠—ho...

Mr. Scogan had been accommodated in a little canvas hut. Dressed in a black skirt and a red bodice, with a yellow-and-red bandana handkerchief tied round his black wig, he looked⁠—sharp-nosed, brown, ...

Towards sunset the fair itself became quiescent. It was the hour for the dancing to begin. At one side of the village of tents a space had been roped off. Acetylene lamps, hung round it on posts, cast...

It was after ten o’clock. The dancers had already dispersed and the last lights were being put out. Tomorrow the tents would be struck, the dismantled merry-go-round would be packed into wagons and ca...

Denis had been called, but in spite of the parted curtains he had dropped off again into that drowsy, dozy state when sleep becomes a sensual pleasure almost consciously savoured. In this condition he...