'Why did Miss Fitch choose this? Searle asked in wonder.

'Because she thought it was grand, Liz said, her voice warm with affection. 'She was brought up in a rectory, you know; the kind of rectory that was built circa 1850; so her eye became conditioned to Victorian Gothic. Even now, you know, she doesn't honestly see what is wrong with it. She knows people laugh at it, and she is quite philosophical about it, but she doesn't really know why they laugh. When she first brought Cormac Ross, her publisher, here, he complimented her on the appropriateness of the name, and she had no idea what he was talking about.

'Well, I'm in no mood to be critical, even of Victorian Gothic, the young man said. 'It was extraordinarily nice of Miss Fitch to have me down here without even stopping to look me up in the reference books. Somehow over in the States we expect more caution from the English.

'It isn't a matter of caution with the English; it's a matter of domestic calculation. Aunt Lavinia asked you down on the spur of the moment because she didn't have to do any domestic reckoning. She knows that there is enough spare linen to furnish a spare bed, and enough food in the house to feed a guest, and enough «labour» to provide for his comfort, and so she has no need to hesitate. Do you mind if we go straight round to the garage and take your things in through the side door. It's a day's march to the front door from the domestics' quarters, the baronial hall unfortunately intervening.

'Who built this and why? Searle asked, looking up at the bulk of the house as they skirted it.

'A man from Bradford, I understand. There was a very pleasant early Georgian house on the spot-there is a print of it in the gun-room-but he thought it a poor-looking object and pulled it down.

So it was through ugly passages, dimly lit, that Searle carried his luggage; passages that Liz said always reminded her of boarding-school.