the macadamised drive.

"I wish so, too," she said, "but he belongs to Mr. Quarrier."



CHAPTER II IMPRUDENCE

A house of native stone built into and among weather-scarred rocks, one
massive wing butting seaward, others nosing north and south among cedars
and outcropping ledges--the whole silver-grey mass of masonry reddening
under a westering sun, every dormer, every leaded diamond pane aflame;
this was Shotover as Siward first beheld it.

Like the craggy vertebrae of a half-buried fossil splitting the sod, a
ragged line of rock rose as a barrier to inland winds; the foreland, set
here and there with tiny lawns and pockets of bright flowers, fell away
to the cliffs; and here, sheer wet black rocks fronted the eternal
battering of the Atlantic.

As the phaeton drew up under a pillared porte-cochere, one or two
servants appeared; a rather imposing specimen bowed them through the
doors into the hall where, in a wide chimney place, the embers of a
drift-wood fire glimmered like a heap of dusty jewels. Bars of sunlight
slanted on wall and rug, on stone floor and carved staircase, on the
bronze foliations of the railed gallery above, where, in the golden
gloom through a high window, sun-tipped tree tops against a sky of azure
stirred like burnished foliage in a tapestry.

"There is nobody here, of course," observed Miss Landis to Siward as