ss De Stancy had great
pleasure in giving Mr. Somerset full permission to walk through whatever
parts of the building he chose.

He followed the butler into the inner buildings of the fortress, the
ponderous thickness of whose walls made itself felt like a physical
pressure. An internal stone staircase, ranged round four sides of a
square, was next revealed, leading at the top of one flight into a
spacious hall, which seemed to occupy the whole area of the keep. From
this apartment a corridor floored with black oak led to the more modern
wing, where light and air were treated in a less gingerly fashion.

Here passages were broader than in the oldest portion, and upholstery
enlisted in the service of the fine arts hid to a great extent the
coldness of the walls.

Somerset was now left to himself, and roving freely from room to room
he found time to inspect the different objects of interest that abounded
there. Not all the chambers, even of the habitable division, were in use
as dwelling-rooms, though these were still numerous enough for the wants
of an ordinary country family. In a long gallery with a coved ceiling
of arabesques which had once been gilded, hung a series of paintings
representing the past personages of the De Stancy line. It was a
remarkable array--even more so on account of the incredibly neglected
condition of the canvases than for the artistic peculiarities they
exhibited. Many of the frames were dropping apart at their angles, and
some of the canvas was so dingy that the face of the person depicted was
only distinguishable as the moon through mist. For the colour they had
now they might have been painted during an eclipse; while, to judge by
the webs tying them to the wall, the spiders that ran up and down their
backs were such as to make the fair originals shudder in their graves.

He wondered how many of the lofty foreheads and smiling lips of this
pictorial pedigree could be credited as true reflections of their
prototypes. Some were wilfully false, no doubt; many more so by
unavoidable accident and want of skill. Somerset felt that it required a
profounder mind than his to disinter from the lumber of conventionality
the lineaments that really sat in the painter's presence, and to
discover their history behind the curtain of mere tradition.

The painters of this long collection were those who usually appear in
such places; Holbein, Jansen, and Vandyck; Sir Peter, Sir Geoffrey, Sir
Joshua, and