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Its pointed gables and great clustering stacks of chimneys, its mullioned and diamond-paned windows, its finely-wooded park, all realize the stranger's ideal of the antique manor-house. This neighborhood is studded with country-houses in all styles of architecture, from the characteristic national to the uncomfortable and cold foreign type.
Now, if the visitor will enter the quaint old church that his fancy has thus restored moving softly, for truly he is on holy ground and every step is over unknown dead he may see in vague vision a very little of the ancient interior: the nave lighted by diamond-paned windows, not stained; the aisles between the rows of pews paved with brick; the chancel paved with tile; a gallery at the end next the tower; and, over all, the heavy timbers of the high-pitched roof.
The dining-room bay hung low over the grass, as Frank wished, and the windows were diamond-paned and leaded, swiveled on brass rods. The parlor and dining-room were separated by sliding doors; but the intention was to hang in this opening a silk hanging depicting a wedding scene in Normandy.
The inn was certainly very pretty. It stood on the very verge of the town, and beyond stretched fields and hedgerows. The house itself was a white-washed, thatched, rustic cottage, with a badly painted sign of a large red sow. Outside were benches, where topers sat, and the windows were delightfully old-fashioned, diamond-paned casements.
The stone flags were as cool and clean as water and hands could make them; the stove shone like burnished silver; the dresser and the table, at which Miss Hepzibah was at work, were white as snow; and the array of tins on the wall was perfectly dazzling with brightness. The wide diamond-paned casement stood open to admit what little air happened to be abroad that sultry afternoon.
The Master at Salem House lifted the latch of one of a number of little black doors that were all alike, and had each a little diamond-paned window on one side, and another little diamond paned window above; and we went into the little house of one of these poor old women, who was blowing a fire to make a little saucepan boil.
There were lights in a great number of the rooms indeed, the lower part of the house was brilliantly illuminated. But as the windows in the beautiful linen-panelled hall were diamond-paned, the brilliance was softened, and there was something deliriously welcoming, almost fairy-like, in the picture the old house presented to its new owner's eager gaze.
I undid the bolts of one of the diamond-paned windows, and, throwing it open, leaned with my arms on the sill, my head and shoulders outside. "Good day to your ladyship and your lordship," I cried, and then all eyes were turned on me, "I have just this day come into my inheritance, and I fear the house is not in a state to receive visitors.
But the Laura who had fretted or dreamed there; who had written her first letter to Molly Friedland from that table; who had dressed for her lover's eye before that rickety glass; who had been angry or sullen, or madly happy there why, the Laura who now for the second time watched the spring dawn through that diamond-paned window looked back upon her as the figures in Rossetti's strange picture meet the ghosts of their old selves with the same sense of immeasurable, irrevocable distance.
It's some old, old place out of England." "Because it was built by an exile," said Rupert softly. "An exile who loved his home so well that he labored five years in the wilderness to build its duplicate. Those little diamond-paned windows were once protected with shutters an inch thick, and the place was a fort in Indian times. But it is strange to this country.
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