reat novelties to him as they could possibly be to any
stranger. Most interesting to him was the life of an Edward De Stancy,
who had lived just before the Civil Wars, and to whom Captain De Stancy
bore a very traceable likeness. This ancestor had a mole on his cheek,
black and distinct as a fly in cream; and as in the case of the first
Lord Amherst's wart, and Bennet Earl of Arlington's nose-scar, the
painter had faithfully reproduced the defect on canvas. It so happened
that the captain had a mole, though not exactly on the same spot of his
face; and this made the resemblance still greater.

He took infinite trouble with his dress that day, showing an amount of
anxiety on the matter which for him was quite abnormal. At last, when
fully equipped, he set out with his sister to make the call proposed.
Charlotte was rather unhappy at sight of her brother's earnest attempt
to make an impression on Paula; but she could say nothing against it,
and they proceeded on their way.

It was the darkest of November weather, when the days are so short that
morning seems to join with evening without the intervention of noon. The
sky was lined with low cloud, within whose dense substance tempests
were slowly fermenting for the coming days. Even now a windy turbulence
troubled the half-naked boughs, and a lonely leaf would occasionally
spin downwards to rejoin on the grass the scathed multitude of its
comrades which had preceded it in its fall. The river by the pavilion,
in the summer so clear and purling, now slid onwards brown and thick and
silent, and enlarged to double size.

II.

Meanwhile Paula was alone. Of anyone else it would have been said that
she must be finding the afternoon rather dreary in the quaint halls
not of her forefathers: but of Miss Power it was unsafe to predicate so
surely. She walked from room to room in a black velvet dress which
gave decision to her outline without depriving it of softness. She
occasionally clasped her hands behind her head and looked out of a
window; but she more particularly bent her footsteps up and down the
Long Gallery, where she had caused a large fire of logs to be kindled,
in her endeavour to extend cheerfulness somewhat beyond the precincts of
the sitting-rooms.

The fire glanced up on Paula, and Paula glanced down at the fire, and at
the gnarled beech fuel, and at the wood-lice which ran out from beneath
the bark to the extremity of the logs as the heat approached them. Th