It was an empty sunlit place that summer evening, sky and earth warm with sundown, and a pewit or so just accentuating the pleasant stillness that ends a long clear day. A beautiful peace, it was, to wreck for ever. And there was my uncle, the modern man of power, in his grey top-hat and his grey suit and his black-ribboned glasses, short, thin-legged, large-stomached, pointing and gesticulating, threatening this calm.
He began with a wave of his arm. "That's the place, George," he said. "See?"
"Eh!" I cried—for I had been thinking of remote things.
"I got it."
"Got what?"
"For a house!—a Twentieth Century house! That's the place for it!"
One of his characteristic phrases was begotten in him. "Four-square to the winds of heaven, George!" he said. "Eh? Four-square to the winds of heaven!"
"You'll get the winds up here," I said.
"A mammoth house it ought to be, George—to suit these hills."
"Quite," I said.
"Great galleries and things—running out there and there—See? I been thinking of it, George! Looking out all this way—across the Weald. With its back to Lady Grove."
"And the morning sun in its eye."
"Like an eagle, George,—like an eagle!"
So he broached to me what speedily became the leading occupation of his culminating years, Crest Hill. But all the world has heard of that extravagant place which grew and changed its plans as it grew, and bubbled like a salted snail, and burgeoned and bulged and
