Page:Walpole--portrait of man with red hair.djvu/60

 side of the Square, and squeezed between its grey walls and the modern town hall was a tall old tower of infinite age, with thin slits of windows and iron bars that pushed out against the pale blue sky like pointing fingers.

There were houses in the Square that were charming, houses with queer bow-windows and protruding doors like pepper-pots, little balconies, and here and there old carved figures on the walls, houses that Whistler would have loved to etch. Harkness stopped a man.

"Can you tell me where I shall find the 'Man-at-Arms' Hotel?" he asked.

"Why, yes," the man answered as though he were surprised that Harkness should not know. "Straight up that street in front of you. You'll find it at the top."

And he did find it at the top after what seemed to him an endless climb. The houses fell away. An iron gate was in front of him as though he were entering some private residence. Going up a long drive he passed beautiful lawns that shone like silk. to the right the grass fell away to a pond fringed with trees. Flowers were around him on every side and again in his nostrils was the heavy scent of innumerable roses.

The drive swept a wide circle before the great eighteenth-century house that now confronted him. But it is not a hotel at all, he thought, and he would