CHAPTER VIII.
THE MIDDLE OF THE STAIRCASE Mallow Court, the Seymours' country home, lay not a mile from the village of St.Wennys.

A low, two-storied house of creeper-clad stone, it stood perched upon the cliffs, overlooking the wild sea which beats up against the Cornish coast.
The house itself had been built in a quaint, three-sided fashion, the central portion and the two wings which flanked it rectangularly serving to enclose a sunk lawn round which ran a wide, flagged path.

A low, grey stone wall, facing the sea, fenced the fourth side of the square, at one end of which a gate gave egress on to the sea-bitten grassy slope that led to the edge of the cliff itself.
A grove of trees half-girdled the house, and this, together with the sheltering upward trend of the downs on one side of it, tempered the violence of the fierce winds which sometimes swept the coast-line even in summer.
Behind the house, under the lee of the rising upland, lay the gardens of Mallow, witness to the loving care of generations.

Stretches of lawn, coolly green and shaven, sloped away from a terrace which ran the whole length of the house, meeting the gravelled drive as it curved past the house-door.

Beyond lay dim sweet alleys, over-arched by trees, and below, where a sudden dip in the configuration of the land admitted of it, were grassy terraces, gay with beds of flowers, linked together by short flights of grass-grown steps.
"I can't understand why you spend so much time in stuffy old London, Kitty, when you have this heavenly place to come to." Nan spoke from a nest of half-a-dozen cushions heaped together beneath the shade of a tree.