« “The very place!” Miss La Trobe had exclaimed the first time she came to call and was shown the grounds. It was a winter’s day. The trees were leafless then. » « She waved her hand at the trees standing bare in the clear light of January. » “There the stage; here the audience; and down there among the bushes a perfect dressing-room for the actors.” She was always all agog to get things up. But where did she spring from? With that name she wasn’t presumably pure English. From the Channel Islands perhaps? Only her eyes and something about her always made Mrs. Bingham suspect that she had Russian blood in her. “Those deep-set eyes; that very square jaw,” reminded her–not that she had been to Russia–of the Tartars. Rumour said that she had kept a tea shop at Winchester; that had failed. She had been an actress. That had failed. She had bought a four-roomed cottage and shared it with an actress. They had quarelled. Very little was actually known about her. Outwardly she was swarthy, sturdy and thick set; strode about the fields in a smock frock; sometimes with a cigarette in her mouth; often with a whip in her hand; and used rather strong language–perhaps, then, she wasn’t altogether a lady? At any rate, she had a passion for getting things up. »

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