“This house in the village—is it not the one we passed in the carriage

“This house in the village—is it not the one we passed in the carriage?”
“Yes,HOMEPAGE, you remember, it had all those picturesque old gables—“
“Picturesque to look at from the outside,North Face Outlet.”
“Of course it would have to be done up.”
“What did you call it?”
“The villagers call it the Little House. But only by compar-ison. It’s many years since I was in it, but I fancy it is a good deal larger than it looks.”
“I know those old houses. Dozens of wretched little rooms. I think the Elizabethans were all dwarfs.”
He smiled (though he might have done better to correct her curious notion of Tudor architecture), and put his arm round her shoulders. “Then Winsyatt itself?”
She gave him a straight little look under her arched eye-brows.
“Do you wish it?”
“You know what it is to me.”
“I may have my way with new decorations?”
“You may raze it to the ground and erect a second Crystal Palace, for all I care.”
“Charles! Be serious,http://www.rolexsubmarinerreplicas.com/!”
She pulled away. But he soon received a kiss of forgive-ness, and went on his way with a light heart. For her part, Ernestina went upstairs and drew out her copious armory of catalogues.
Chapter 23
Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew ...
—Hardy, “Transformations”


The chaise, its calash down to allow Charles to enjoy the spring sunshine, passed the gatehouse. Young Hawkins stood by the opened gates, old Mrs. Hawkins beamed coyly at the door of the cottage. And Charles called to the under-coachman who had been waiting at Chippenham and now drove with Sam beside him on the box, to stop a moment. A special relationship existed between Charles and the old woman. Without a mother since the age of one, he had had to put up with a series of substitutes as a little boy; in his stays at Winsyatt he had attached himself to this same Mrs. Hawkins, technically in those days the head laundrymaid, but by right of service and popularity second only below stairs to the august housekeeper herself. Perhaps Charles’s affection for Aunt Tranter was an echo of his earlier memories of the simple woman—a perfect casting for Baucis—who now hob-bled down the path to the garden gate to greet him.
He had to answer all her eager inquiries about the forthcoming marriage; and to ask in his turn after her children. She seemed more than ordinarily solicitous for him, and he detected in her eye that pitying shadow the kind-hearted poor sometimes reserve for the favored rich. It was a shadow he knew of old, bestowed by the innocent-shrewd country wom-an on the poor motherless boy with the wicked father—for gross rumors of Charles’s surviving parent’s enjoyment of the pleasures of London life percolated down to Winsyatt. It seemed singularly out of place now, that mute sympathy, but Charles permitted it with an amused tolerance. It came from love of him,Website, as the neat gatehouse garden, and the parkland, beyond, and the clumps of old trees—each with a well-loved name, Carson’s Stand, Ten-pine Mound, Ramillies (planted in celebration of that battle), the Oak-and-Elm, the Muses’ Grove and a dozen others, all as familiar to Charles as the names of the parts of his body—and the great avenue of limes, the iron railings, as all in his view of the domain came that day also, or so he felt, from love of him. At last he smiled down at the old laundrymaid. “I must get on. My uncle expects me.” Mrs. Hawkins looked for a moment as if she would not let herself be so easily dismissed; but the servant overcame the substitute mother. She contented herself with touching his hand as it lay on the chaise door. “Aye, Mr. Charles. He expects you.”