Very deft, and tender, and skilful it must be.

But no one could say that time-worn Persian rugs, with their iridescent blue and greens and rose reds--or old Italian damask and cut-velvet from Genoa, or Florence, or Venice--were out of harmony with the charming Jacobean rooms.

It was the horrible furniture of the Vavasours, the ancestral possessors of the place, which had been an offence and a disfigurement.
In moving it out and replacing it, Diana felt that she had become the spiritual child of the old house, in spite of her alien blood.

There is a kinship not of the flesh; and it thrilled all through her.
But just as her pause of daily homage to the place in which she found herself was over, and she was about to run down the remaining stairs to the dining-room, a new thought delayed her for a moment by the staircase window--the thought of a lady who would no doubt be waiting for her at the breakfast-table.
Mrs.Colwood, Miss Mallory's new chaperon and companion, had arrived the night before, on Christmas Eve.

She had appeared just in time for dinner, and the two ladies had spent the evening together.