t is a great mistake to suppose that such houses stand high
in chivalric tradition. Few except the poor preserve traditions.
Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions. The Bohuns had been
Mohocks under Queen Anne and Mashers under Queen Victoria. But like more
than one of the really ancient houses, they had rotted in the last two
centuries into mere drunkards and dandy degenerates, till there had even
come a whisper of insanity. Certainly there was something hardly
human about the colonel's wolfish pursuit of pleasure, and his chronic
resolution not to go home till morning had a touch of the hideous
clarity of insomnia. He was a tall, fine animal, elderly, but with
hair still startlingly yellow. He would have looked merely blonde and
leonine, but his blue eyes were sunk so deep in his face that they
looked black. They were a little too close together. He had very long
yellow moustaches; on each side of them a fold or furrow from nostril to
jaw, so that a sneer seemed cut into his face. Over his evening clothes
he wore a curious pale yellow coat that looked more like a very light
dressing gown than an overcoat, and on the back of his head was stuck an
extraordinary broad-brimmed hat of a bright green colour, evidently some
oriental curiosity caught up at random. He was proud of appearing in
such incongruous attires--proud of the fact that he always made them
look congruous.

His brother the curate had also the yellow hair and the elegance, but
he was buttoned up to the chin in black, and his face was clean-shaven,
cultivated, and a little nervous. He seemed to live for nothing but his
religion; but there were some who said (notably the blacksmith, who was
a Presbyterian) that it was a love of Gothic architecture rather than of
God, and that his haunting of the church like a ghost was only another
and purer turn of the almost morbid thirst for beauty which sent his
brother raging after women and wine. This charge was doubtful, while the
man's practical piety was indubitable. Indeed, the charge was mostly an
ignorant misunderstanding of the love of solitude and secret prayer, and
was founded on his being often found kneeling, not before the altar, but
in peculiar places, in the crypts or gallery, or even in the belfry.
He was at the moment about to enter the church through the yard of
the smithy, but stopped and frowned a little as he saw his brother's
cavernous eyes staring in the same direction. On the hypothesis