c painting
in the whole collection.

It was all wonderful and interesting to Vera. She elaborated whole
romances to herself out of these portraits. She settled their loves and
their temptations, heart-broken separations, and true lovers' meetings
between them. Each one had his or her history woven out of the slender
materials which Mrs. Eccles could give her of their real lives. Only one
thing disappointed her, there was no portrait of the present Sir John.
She would have liked to have seen what he was like, this man who was
unmarried still, and who had never cared to live in the house of his
fathers. She wondered what the mystery had been that kept him from it.
She could not understand that a man should deliberately prefer dark,
dirty, dingy London, which she had only once seen in passing from one
station to the other on her way to Sutton, to a life in this quiet
old-world red-brick house, with the rooks cawing among trees, and the
long chestnut glades stretching away into the park, and all the venerable
associations of those portraits of his ancestors. Some trouble, some
sorrow, must have kept him away from it, she felt.

But she would not question Mrs. Eccles about him; she encouraged her to
talk of the dead and gone generations as much as she pleased, but of the
man who was her master Vera would have thought it scarcely honourable to
have spoken to his servant. Perhaps, too, she preferred her dreams. One
day, idly opening the drawer of an old bureau in the little room which
Mrs. Eccles always called religiously "My lady's morning room," Vera came
upon a modern photograph that arrested her attention wonderfully.

It represented, however, nothing very remarkable; only a
broad-shouldered, good-looking young man, with an aquiline noise and a
close-cropped head. On the reverse side of the card was written in
pencil, "My son--for Mrs. Eccles." Lady Kynaston, she supposed, must
therefore have sent it to the old housekeeper, and of course it was Sir
John. Vera pushed it back again into the drawer with a little flush, as
though she had been guilty of an indiscretion in looking at it, and she
said no word of her discovery to the housekeeper. A day or two later she
sought for it again in the same place, but it had been taken away.

But the face thus seen made an impression upon her. She did not forget
it; and when Sir John Kynaston's name was mentioned, she invested him
with the living likeness of the photograph she had see