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The fire burned cheerily in the polished grate, and winked on every shining thing in the room; primroses bloomed in the diamond-paned casement; the skylark fluttered up and sang in its cage; the fife whistled as gaily as a blackbird, and the little dog danced with a comic clumsiness that made them all double up with laughter.
Anne took an especial fancy to one of the small ones, looking out into the big pines, and hoped it would be hers. It was papered in pale blue and had a little, old-timey toilet table with sconces for candles. There was a diamond-paned window with a seat under the blue muslin frills that would be a satisfying spot for studying or dreaming.
A flagstone walk and stone steps led up from the drive, seemingly right into the wide front door, which had small, diamond-paned, heavily shuttered windows in it, and queer holes on each side. "To shoot through in case of marauding Indians," answered Uncle Cradd to my startled question, which had sprung from a suspicion that must have been dictated by prenatal knowledge.
There were the two curtained doorways through which Lady Chillington had come and gone. For the rest, it was a gloomy place enough, with its flagged floor, and its diamond-paned windows high up in the semicircular roof.
Through her diamond-paned window he saw the wrinkled, white-capped old creature spinning peacefully at the rustic chimney-corner, a pure cloistral crone. It seemed profane to connect such a figure with flirtation this was surely the very virgin of senility. What a fine picture she made too! Why had he never thought of painting her?
It was all gables, and chimney-stacks, and odd angles, and ivy-mantled wall, and richly-mullioned windows, or quaint little diamond-paned lattices, peeping like a watchful eye from under the shadow of a jutting cornice. The stables had been added in Queen Elizabeth's time, after the monks had been routed from their snug quarters, and the Abbey had been bestowed upon one of the Tudor favourites.
On the mantelpiece above the fireplace there were three deep blue bowls, the only ornaments in the room. Beyond the little diamond-paned windows, beyond the dark mysteries of the Fellows' garden, a golden mist rose from the lamps of the street, there were stars in the sky. He faced his books.
But for the low ceiling and the wide cypress puncheons of the floor the room might have been a boudoir in a manor-house. On the slender-legged, polished mahogany table lay books in tasteful bindings; a diamond-paned bookcase stood in the corner; a fauteuil and various other chairs which might have come from the hands of an Adam were ranged about.
The door which opened upon it fairly spoke hospitality and welcome from its beautiful fan-like arch to its diamond-paned side lights and the hall within was considered one of the more perfect specimens of the architecture of its period to be found in the state, as was the stately circular double stairway leading to the floor above.
No wonder that under the circumstances Fairbridge had charms that allured, that people chose it for suburban residences, that the small, ornate, new houses with their perky little towers and æsthetic diamond-paned windows, multiplied. Fairbridge was in reality very artistically planned as to the sites of its houses.
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