“Care for the victrola, Benton? I got one out recently. It amuses the boys.”
“Why, yes, I’d like it.”
Dane nodded at Lee.
II
Roger turned in his chair a little so that he could look into the room with the three doors. He had never been asked into it, nor, indeed, into the house since his host had reconstructed it. As Valerie had thought, it had been built by an early missionary, and no less a person than Bishop Selwyn had once lived there. It amused Benton to think that the same walls should have housed two such dissimilar men, for Roger had supposed many of the rumours about Dane were true, even while he remained tolerant to the man.
The house had been constructed with some taste, for the studs were high, the ceilings of the main rooms beamed, and the brick fireplaces large. Dane had replaced the old wall paper with linings of oiled rimu. The room with the three doors had originally been two, but he had taken out the partition to make it spacious enough to house most of the Oriental things he had picked up when travelling in the East.
Roger had heard Davenport Carr say that Dane Barrington’s Indian rugs and Chinese things were so valuable that he had willed them to the Sydney Museum, but this did not impress him so much as did the suggestion of silken rakishness that he got through the curtained slits of those tantalizing doors. He had once managed to sit opposite one of them long enough to have his senses tickled by the riot of gold and vermilion and wondrous blues and greens that lit the room and the walls.
