enough, do you suppose--"

"But I thought you said that Mrs. Charles Carew was not a girl?"

"Nor more she was: she was five-and-thirty if she was a day; and
yet--_there_ was the wonder of it--she did not look much over twenty!
I've heard our gentlemen, when out shooting, liken her to some fine
Frenchwoman as never grew old, and was fell in love with unbeknown by
her grandson. Now, what was her name? I got it written down somewhere in
my old pocket-book; it was summut like Longclothes."

"_Ninon de l'Enclos?_" suggested Yorke, without a smile.

"Ay, that's the name. Well, Mrs. Charles Carew, as you call her, was
just like her, and a regular everlasting! She was not what you would
call pretty, but very "taking" looking, and with a bloom and freshness
on her as would have deceived any man. Her voice was like music itself,
and she moved like a stag o' ten; and the Squire being always manly
looking and swarthy, like yourself, there was really little difference
between them to look at. I dare say she's gone all to pieces now, as
women will do, while the Squire looks much the same as he did then."

"I have never even seen him," said the landscape-painter, moodily.

"Well, don't you stare at him, young master, when you do get that
chance, that's all. Some comes down here merely to look at him, as if he
was a show, and that puts him in a pretty rage, I promise you; though to
get to know him, as I say, is easy enough, if you go the right way about
it. If you were a good rider, for instance, and could lead the field one
day when the hunting begins, he'd ask you to dinner to a certainty; or
if you could drive stags--why, he would have given you a hundred pounds
last midsummer, when we couldn't get the beasts to swim the lake.
There's a pretty mess come o' that, by-the-by; for, out of the talk
there was among the gentlemen about that difficulty, the Squire laid a
bet as _he_ would drive stags; not as _we_ do, mind you, but in harness,
like carriage-horses; and, cuss me, if he hasn't had the break out half
a dozen times with four red deer in it, and you may see him tearing
through the park, with mounted grooms and keepers on the right and left
of him, all galloping their hardest, and the Squire with the ribbons,
a-holloaing like mad! For my part, I don't like such pranks, and would
much sooner not be there to see 'em. There will be mischief some day
with it yet, for all that old Lord Orford, down at Newmarket some fifty
years a