d by
clusters of barbaric spears and knives, hung against the oak, burnished
to a high polish, flashing against their time-blackened background.

Visitors were not expected. Octon's man--a small wizened fellow of full
middle age--seemed rather startled by the sight of Jenny; he hastily
pushed, rather than ushered, us into the dining room, a room on the left
of the doorway. In a moment or two Octon came to us. He stood in the
doorway, his big frame looking immense under the low lintel which his
head all but touched.

"You're not the visitors I expected," he said with a laugh. "I've stayed
in, waiting for Aspenick."

"Sir John won't come," said Jenny. "But I must speak to you--alone." She
turned to me. "You're sure you don't mind, Austin?"

"Of course you must see him alone. Where shall I go?"

"Stay here," he said. "We'll go next door--in the study."

He held the door for her, and she went out. I heard them enter a room
next to the one in which I was; the door was shut after them. Then for a
long while I heard nothing more, except the murmur of the little river,
which seemed loud to my unaccustomed ears, though probably people living
in the house would soon cease to notice it.

Presently I heard their voices; his was so loud that, for fear of
hearing the words, I had deliberately to abstract my mind by looking at
this, that, and the other thing in the room--more spears and knives on
the walls, books about his subject on the shelves, a couple of fine old
silver tankards gleaming on the mantelpiece. The voices died down again
just as I had exhausted the interest of the tankards, and taken in my
hand a miniature which stood on the top of the marble clock.

His voice fell to inaudibility; the welcome silence left me alone with
the little picture. It represented a child perhaps fourteen years old--a
small, delicate face, dark in complexion, touched on the cheeks with a
red flush, with large dark eyes, framed in plentiful black hair which
curled about the forehead. Whoever the young girl was, she was
beautiful; her eyes seemed to gaze at me from some remote kingdom of
childish purity; her lips laughed that I should feel awe at her eyes.
How in the world came she on Octon's mantelpiece?

Picked up somewhere for half a sovereign--as a pretty thing! That was
the suggestion of common sense, in rebellion against a certain sense of
over-strained nerves under which I was conscious of suffering. Yet,
after all, Octon, like o