course;
we are always that, William. But I hope I can be your ally, and be quite
neutral; I would so much rather.'

'Well, I suppose it will not be a breach of your precious neutrality if
you get me invited to see the castle?'

'O no!' she said brightly; 'I don't mind doing such a thing as that.
Why not come with me tomorrow? I will say I am going to bring you. There
will be no trouble at all.'

De Stancy readily agreed. The effect upon him of the information now
acquired was to intensify his ardour tenfold, the stimulus being due to
a perception that Somerset, with a little more knowledge, would hold a
card which could be played with disastrous effect against himself--his
relationship to Dare. Its disclosure to a lady of such Puritan
antecedents as Paula's, would probably mean her immediate severance from
himself as an unclean thing.

'Is Miss Power a severe pietist, or precisian; or is she a compromising
lady?' he asked abruptly.

'She is severe and uncompromising--if you mean in her judgments on
morals,' said Charlotte, not quite hearing. The remark was peculiarly
apposite, and De Stancy was silent.

He spent some following hours in a close study of the castle history,
which till now had unutterably bored him. More particularly did he
dwell over documents and notes which referred to the pedigree of his own
family. He wrote out the names of all--and they were many--who had been
born within those domineering walls since their first erection; of those
among them who had been brought thither by marriage with the owner, and
of stranger knights and gentlemen who had entered the castle by marriage
with its mistress. He refreshed his memory on the strange loves and
hates that had arisen in the course of the family history; on memorable
attacks, and the dates of the same, the most memorable among them being
the occasion on which the party represented by Paula battered down the
castle walls that she was now about to mend, and, as he hoped, return in
their original intact shape to the family dispossessed, by marriage with
himself, its living representative.

In Sir William's villa were small engravings after many of the portraits
in the castle galleries, some of them hanging in the dining-room in
plain oak and maple frames, and others preserved in portfolios. De
Stancy spent much of his time over these, and in getting up the romances
of their originals' lives from memoirs and other records, all which
stories were as g