The Postmaster’s Daughter

Chapter I.
The Face at the Window

John Menzies Grant, having breakfasted, filled his pipe, lit it, and strolledout bare-headed into the garden. The month was June, that glorious rose-monthwhich gladdened England before war-clouds darkened the summer sky. As the hourwas nine o’clock, it is highly probable that many thousands of men werethen strolling out into many thousands of gardens in precisely similarconditions; but, given youth, good health, leisure, and a fair amount of money,it is even more probable that few among the smaller number thus roundly favoredby fortune looked so perplexed as Grant.

Moreover, his actions were eloquent as words. A spacious French window had beencut bodily out of the wall of an old-fashioned room, and was now thrown wide toadmit the flower-scented breeze. Between this window and the right-hand angleof the room was a smaller window, square-paned, high above the ground level,and deeply recessed—in fact just the sort of window which one mightexpect to find in a farm-house built two centuries ago, when light and air wererigorously excluded from interiors. The two windows told the history of TheHollies at a glance. The little one had served the needs of a“best” room for several generations of Sussex yeomen. Then had comesome iconoclast who hewed a big rectangle through the solid stone-work,converted the oak-panelled apartment into a most comfortable dining-room, builta new wing with a gable, changed a farm-yard into a flower-bordered lawn, andgenerally played havoc with Georgian utility while carrying out a determinedscheme of landscape gardening.

Happily, the wrecker was content t

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