Lucy and father of Oliver and Mrs.
Fotheringham, had made an enormous fortune in the Iron Trade of the
north, retiring at sixty that he might enjoy some of those pleasures of
life for which business had left him too little time. One of these
pleasures was building. Henry Marsham had spent ten years in building
Tallyn, and at the end of that time, feeling it impossible to live in
the huge incoherent place he had created, he hired a small villa at Nice
and went to die there in privacy and peace. Nevertheless, his will laid
strict injunctions upon his widow to inhabit and keep up Tallyn;
injunctions backed by considerable sanctions of a financial kind. His
will, indeed, had been altogether a document of some eccentricity;
though as eight years had now elapsed since his death, the knowledge of
its provisions possessed by outsiders had had time to grow vague. Still,
there were strong general impressions abroad, and as Alicia Drake
surveyed the house which the old man had built to be the incubus of his
descendants, some of them teased her mind. It was said, for instance,
that Oliver Marsham and his sister only possessed pittances of about a
thousand a year apiece, while Tallyn, together with the vast bulk of
Henry Marsham's fortune, had been willed to Lady Lucy, and lay,
moreover, at her absolute disposal. Was this so, or no? Miss Drake's
curiosity, for some time past, would have been glad to be informed.

Meanwhile, here was the house--about which there was no mystery--least
of all, as to its cost. Interminable broad corridors, carpeted with ugly
Brussels and suggesting a railway hotel, branched out before Miss
Drake's eyes in various directions; upon them opened not bedrooms but
"suites," as Mr. Marsham pere had loved to call them, of which the
number was legion, while the bachelors' wing alone would have lodged a
regiment. Every bedroom was like every other, except for such variations
as Tottenham Court Road, rioting at will, could suggest. Copies in
marble or bronze of well-known statues ranged along the corridors--a
forlorn troupe of nude and shivering divinities. The immense hall below,
with its violent frescos and its brand-new Turkey carpets, was panelled
in oak, from which some device of stain or varnish had managed to
abstract every particle of charm. A whole oak wood, indeed, had been
lavished on the swathing and sheathing of the house, With the only
result that the spectator beheld it steeped in a repellent yellow-