in deepest mourning, and of the housekeeper
type, answers his summons, her eyes red with excessive weeping.

"I am going now," Lord Sartoris whispers to her in a low tone. "I have
finished everything. You will remain here until my return."

"Yes, Mr. Arthur,--yes, my Lord," she answers, nervously; and then, as
she gives the old title for the first time to the man before her, she
bursts out crying afresh, yet silently, in a subdued fashion, as
though ashamed of her emotion.

Sartoris pats her shoulder kindly, and then with a sigh turns away,
and passes from the room with bent head and hands still clasped behind
him, as has become a habit with him of late years.

Down the stairs and along the hall he goes, until, reaching a door at
the lower end, he pauses before it, and, opening it, enters a room,
half library, half boudoir, furnished in a somewhat rococo style.

It is a room curiously built, being a complete oval, with two French
windows opening to the ground, and a glass door between them--partly
stained--that leads to the parterre outside. It is filled with
mediaeval furniture, uncompromising and as strictly uncomfortable as
should be, and has its walls (above the wooden dado) covered with a
high-art paper, on which impossible storks, and unearthly birds of all
descriptions, are depicted as rising out of blue-green rushes.

This room is known as "my lady's chamber,"--having ever been the
exclusive property of the mistress of the house, until Mrs. Dorian
Branscombe, in default of any other mistress, had made her own of it
during her frequent visits to Hythe, and had refurnished it to suit
her own tastes, which were slightly AEsthetic.

Now, she too is dead and gone, and the room, though never entirely
closed or suffered to sink into disrepair, is seldom used by any of
the household.

As Lord Sartoris goes in, a young man, who has been standing at one of
the windows, turns and comes quickly to meet him. He is of good
height, and is finely formed, with brown hair cut closely to his head,
a brown moustache, and deep-blue eyes. His whole appearance is perhaps
more pleasing and aristocratic than strictly handsome, his mouth
being too large and his nose too pronounced for any particular style
of beauty.

Yet it is his eyes--perfect as they are in shape and color--that
betray the chief faults of his disposition. He is too easy-going, too
thoughtless of consequences, too much given to letting things
go,--without co