SEVENThe old rooms at the Manor lighted up well—the dining-room with its panelled walls and its portraits, its draw-table and its high-backed chairs; the drawing-room with its French carpet and the brocaded curtains which might look shabby in the daytime but whose ageing beauty preserved a lamplit splendour. Fifty years before, their tints of peach and gold would have been repeated in the covering of chairs and couches, but today the patched remnants were hidden under loose chintz covers too often cleaned to do more than hint that they had once displayed pale wreaths of flowers. There were portraits here too—a charming graceful creature with a look of Valentine, Lady Adela Repton in the dress she had worn at the famous Waterloo ball—her husband Ambrose, shot down by the Duke’s side next da
