ed an epitaph, which has perpetuated to our times
the estimate formed by his "inconsolable widow," the Dowager Lady
Mardykes, of the virtues and accomplishments of her deceased lord.

Lady Walsingham would have qualified two or three of the more
highly-coloured hyperboles, at which the Golden Friars of those days
sniffed and tittered. They don't signify now; there is no contemporary
left to laugh or whisper. And if there be not much that is true in the
letter of that inscription, it at least perpetuates something that _is_
true--that wonderful glorificaion of partisanship, the affection of an
idolising wife.

Lady Mardykes, a few days after the funeral, left Mardykes Hall for
ever. She lived a great deal with her sister, Lady Walsingham; and died,
as a line cut at the foot of Sir Bale Mardykes' epitaph records, in the
year 1790; her remains being laid beside those of her beloved husband in
Golden Friars.

The estates had come to Sir Bale Mardykes free of entail. He had been
pottering over a will, but it was never completed, nor even quite
planned; and after much doubt and scrutiny, it was at last ascertained
that, in default of a will and of issue, a clause in the
marriage-settlement gave the entire estates to the Dowager Lady
Mardykes.

By her will she bequeathed the estates to "her cousin, also a kinsman of
the late Sir Bale Mardykes her husband," William Feltram, on condition
of his assuming the name and arms of Mardykes, the arms of Feltram being
quartered in the shield.

Thus was oddly fulfilled the prediction which Philip Feltram had
repeated, that the estates of Mardykes were to pass into the hands of a
Feltram.

About the year 1795 the baronetage was revived, and William Feltram
enjoyed the title for fifteen years, as Sir William Mardykes.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK J. S. LE FANU'S GHOSTLY TALES,
VOLUME 3***

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