as one without bias, whether Matocton had ever boasted a
more delectable mistress. Equity--or in his fond eyes at
least,--demanded a negative. Only in one of these canvases, a
counterfeit of Miss Evelyn Ramsay, born a Ramsay of Blenheim, that had
married the common great-great-grandfather of both the colonel and
Patricia--Major Orlando Musgrave, an aide-de-camp to General Charles Lee
in the Revolution,--Rudolph Musgrave found, or seemed to find, dear
likenesses to that demented seraph who was about to stoop to his
unworthiness.

He spent much time before this portrait. Yes, yes! this woman had been
lovely in her day. And this bright, roguish shadow of her was lovely,
too, eternally postured in white patnet, trimmed with a vine of
rose-colored satin leaves, a pink rose in her powdered hair and a huge
ostrich plume as well.

Yet it was an adamantean colonel that remarked:

"My dear, perhaps it is just as fortunate as not that you have quitted
Matocton. For I have heard tales of you, Miss Ramsay. Oh, no! I honestly
do not believe that you would have taken kindlily to any young
person--not even in the guise of a great-great-grand-daughter,--to whom
you cannot hold a candle, madam. A fico for you, madam," said the most
undutiful of great-great-grandsons.

Let us leave him to his roseate meditations. Questionless, in the woman
he loved there was much of his own invention: but the circumstance is
not unhackneyed; and Colonel Musgrave was in a decorous fashion the
happiest of living persons.

Meanwhile Joe Parkinson, a young man much enamored, who fought the
world by ordinary, like Hal o' the Wynd "for his own hand," was seeing
Patricia every day.

V

Joe Parkinson--tall and broad-shouldered, tanned, resolute, chary of
speech, decisive in gesture, having close-cropped yellow hair and frank,
keen eyes like amethysts,--was the one alien present when Colonel
Musgrave came again into Roger Stapylton's fine and choicely-furnished
mansion.

This was on the evening Roger Stapylton gave the long-anticipated dinner
at which he was to announce his daughter's engagement. As much indeed
was suspected by most of his dinner-company, so carefully selected from
the aristocracy of Lichfield; and the heart of the former overseer, as
these handsome, courtly and sweet voiced people settled according to
their rank about his sumptuous table, was aglow with pride.

Then Rudolph Musgrave turned to his companion and said softly: "My