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Keir had been saving money for the last five years, and when he had to cash a wad of Savings Certificates to pay for the furnished felicities of the new home, he understood that it would take him at least two years to make the damage good. But he was not in a mood to regret it. After all, the act was very much to his credit. He had been able to walk into Messrs. Bond & Beaverbrook’s and behave like a man of property. He had laid the foundations of a home, both sentimentally and in reality.

He was very much in love with Sybil, and Sybil was very much in love with him. Her enthusiasms could be personal. She thought Keir a rather wonderful person, and she showed it, and no man quarrels with a plumed hat when it is placed on his head by such eager hands. Keir felt pleasantly self-important, and Sybil was so sure that she could make life pleasant for him.

She was impulsive and affectionate. She told him that cook was giving her lessons in the Darvels kitchen, and that she was making famous progress, though her first cake had had to be smuggled into the Darvels dustbin.

“I do want you to be comfortable, Keir. I’m going to be so busy.”

His vision of her active in No. 3 Paragon Place was a happy one. Every evening he would come home to Sybil. He saw himself sitting in one of those two-guinea chairs, smoking a pipe and reading, while Sybil sewed. He supposed that all women sewed. And they would have their bicycles, and on Sundays they could set out together on those pleasant pilgrimages into the country, and it seemed to him that every Sunday would be like that wonderful Sunday on the hills above Shere.

Meanwhile the old Santers had decided to vacate No. 3 and to move into their new cottage at an earlier date, and Sybil discovered that she would like the little parlour and the best bedroom repapered. Keir interviewed his new landlord, a retired ironmonger, who had found to his cost that cottage property could be more bother than it was worth. He owned six of the cottages in Paragon Place and was always trying to sell them. He was curt with Keir.

“What! New wallpaper! I did the cottage up inside three years ago, and its in good order.”

Keir said that his wife wanted new paper, and that if the landlord would provide the paper, he would get the hanging done.

“Expect me to waste money, do you, just because a young woman’s got ideas? Nothing doing. I don’t get three per cent on those damned cottages.”

So, Keir agreeing with Sybil that the wallpaper previously selected by the old Santers was utterly hideous, bought new paper himself from Samson & Hoad and paid one of Mr. Samson’s painters and paperhangers to hang the paper for him. He decided to do the painting himself on Saturday afternoon. Sybil had been allowed to choose the paper, and she had selected a flower pattern that was rather highly coloured. Keir would have preferred a plain buff or pale lemon lining paper, but he allowed Sybil her couleur de rose.

Going round one Saturday afternoon to Paragon Place, two days after the Santers had moved out, and carrying a four-pound pot of cream paint and an old attaché case that contained brushes, an apron, a putty-knife, sandpaper, and other accessories, a coincidence introduced him to one of his next-door neighbours. Happening to look out of the kitchen window, he saw a man in what was now his—Keir’s—back garden. The man had a spade and was digging up something. Keir watched him for a moment. The man was removing one of the rhubarb stools that the Santers had left in a corner near an old shed at the end of the garden.

Keir opened the back door and challenged the stranger.

“Hallo—what’s the idea?”

The man swung round rather like some large beast, and to Keir his appearance suggested a rogue elephant. Even his trousered legs were like the legs of an elephant. He had little, evil eyes, a vastness of shoulder and of belly, a nose that was both long and flattened and red at the tip.

The man stared at Keir. He was one Mr. William Block, a casual labourer, and very casual at that, and the husband of the frowsy lady whom Keir had seen banging a mat against the wall. He appeared quite unabashed by Keir’s challenge. In fact he met it with a suggestion of truculence.

“Takin’ somethin’ what’s mine—that’s all.”

Keir walked down the path.

“How’s that? I’ve taken on this place.”

Quite deliberately the man resumed his disinterring of the rhubarb root.

“Old Tom gave it t’me.”

It was a lie, but Keir could not nail it as such. Mr. Block got hold of the stool by the stalks, lifted it, dropped it over the fence, wiped a hand on the seat of his trousers, and spat. Then he looked at Keir in a particular sort of way. The other tenants of Paragon Place were wise as to that look.

“Any complaints?”

Keir flushed slightly. He was beginning to feel more than unfriendly to this great sodden, swaggering hulk.

“Well, you’ll keep out of here in the future.”

The man showed him an assortment of very rotten teeth.

“Bit cocky, aren’t you? You keep yer sauce to yerself.”

He swung one large leg over the improvisation that was a fence. It was his fence, and he said so. The second leg followed the first, but he had left his spade behind. He told Keir to remedy the omission.

“Chuck it over, Mr. Little-un.”

Keir chucked it over and went back to No. 3.