Everybody's favourite Author:John Strange Winter Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. WELCOME. " The only way to have a friend is to be one." —Emebson. Breakfast at the Oriol House was fairly under way. The breakfast-room ... more »overlooked the Chantry garden, a quaint, triangular piece of turf, bordered by neat gravel paths, narrow flower beds, and shaded by a few fine old trees, which was sacred to the dwellers in the houses on one side of the Cathedral Close of Northtowers. Each of the houses in the Close had its bit, large or small, of private ground, but the Chantry garden was a semi-private possession, of which those privileged to enjoy it were exceedingly proud. Mrs. Drummond's breakfast-room not only looked into the Chantry garden, but that side of the house lay so that it got every gleam of morning sunshine. The sun was streaming in at the large oriel window that morning, although winter was not yet WELCOME. 29 passed, the trees had not begun to bud, or the jackdaws, high up in the cathedral towers, to busy themselves in nursery matters. The room was singularly comfortable-looking, and was unmistakably the favourite sitting-room of a woman of taste, possessed of the means of gratifying the same. A bright fire blazed in the wide grate, a huge, smoke-grey Persian cat lay coiled like a ball of fluff on the black bear-skin rug; the Recorder sat at one end of the table and Mrs. Drummond at the other—he occupied with the Morning Post, and she busy with the pages of a fashionable feminine journal. " Some more omelette, Adelaide ? " he suggested, looking at her over the top of his newspaper. " It is unusually good this morning. You ought to mention it to cook." " Yes, it is good, Roger; I will have a little more. Another cup of tea, dear boy ? " She always called him "dear boy," although his beard was white and his close-cut h...« less