A little routing in attics and forgotten
cupboards and chests had produced astonishing results. Chippendale
chairs and settees had been brought down from the servants'
bedrooms; two fine Dutch cabinets had been discovered amid a mass of
lumber in an outhouse; a tall Japanese screen, dating from the end
of the eighteenth century, and many pairs of linen curtains
embroidered about the same time in branching oriental patterns by
the hands of Mannering ladies, had been unearthed, and Pamela--for
Elizabeth having started the search had interfered very little with
its results--had spent some of her now scanty leisure in making the
best of the finds. The hall was now a charming place, scented,
moreover, on this January evening by the freesias and narcissus that
Elizabeth had managed to rear in the house itself, and Pamela, who
had always been ashamed of her own ill-kept and out-at-elbows home,
as compared with the perfections of Chetworth, had been showing
Arthur and Beryl Chicksands what had been done to renovate the old
house since they were last in it--'and all without spending a
penny!'--with a girlish pleasure which in the Captain's opinion
became her greatly.
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