so
comely. I turned to her with some such words, and found her facing me,
so much of haggard trouble in her eyes that I stopped, aghast.

"Sir," she said, twisting her fingers, "I see you do not understand--I
thought you knew. I--I am the woman you speak of. Your grandfather is
within, and the other--the man--with him."

III

Our old house being designed and built with a shiplike compactness,
there was but one room on the ground floor besides the kitchen and its
offices. It was a plain, comfortable place, wainscoted about, with
shelves and lockers in the whimsical copy of a vessel's cabin. And it
contained the single work of art our establishment could show; that is,
a portrait of my grandfather's grandfather,--he who founded this
house,--in a finicking attitude, with a brocade coat and a pair of
compasses. In his rear were to be seen a pillar and a red velvet
curtain, and (distantly) a fine storm of clouds and lightning. Never was
a respectable old sailorman so misrepresented; but all his descendants
except one regarded this gaudy daub with almost religious veneration.
Every family has its one great man; the admiral was ours. His was the
distinction of being the only Pendarves who had ever managed to amass a
fortune. It had dribbled through the fingers of succeeding generations;
but there was a tradition that some part of it, buried or otherwise
secreted with an admirable forethought by the old gentleman, might yet
be discovered, to the further glorification of our house.

The picture hung directly opposite the door, favoring me, as I entered,
with a disconcerting smirk; it needed no great stretch of fancy to
credit him with cherishing some secret and villainous joke. Beneath it
sat my grandfather, with his pipe, in the same place and attitude as I
remembered him for upward of twenty years, but so spectral a likeness of
himself that the sight of him shocked me like a blow. He had wasted to a
mere parchment envelop of bones, and the eyes he turned to mine were
bright with inward fever. I had looked for I do not know what signs of
an unstable mind, but at first, save for the eyes, saw none. He showed
only a not too well pleased surprise.

"Nicol!" he said, and pushed back his chair, without rising. "Nicol!"
and then for a moment sat staring closely at me under his heavy brows.
With his next action something of the horror of his affliction came home
to me, for I saw that, but for some confused sense that I had bee