"When I was a lad of your years, Kenneth, the hall--ours was the castle,
theirs the hall--was occupied by two young sparks who made little shift
to keep up the pious reputation of their house. They dwelt there with
their mother--a woman too weak to check their ways, and holding, mayhap,
herself, views not altogether puritanical. They discarded the sober
black their forbears had worn for generations, and donned gay Cavalier
garments. They let their love-locks grow; set plumes in their castors
and jewels in their ears; they drank deep, ruffled it with the boldest
and decked their utterance with great oaths--for to none doth blasphemy
come more readily than to lips that in youth have been overmuch shaped
in unwilling prayer.

"Me they avoided as they would a plague, and when at times we met, our
salutations were grave as those of, men on the point of crossing swords.
I despised them for their coarse, ruffling apostasy more than ever
my father had despised their father for a bigot, and they guessing or
knowing by instinct what was in my mind held me in deeper rancour even
than their ancestors had done mine. And more galling still and yet a
sharper spur to their hatred did those whelps find in the realization
that all the countryside held, as it had held for ages, us to be their
betters. A hard blow to their pride was that, but their revenge was not
long in coming.

"It chanced they had a cousin--a maid as sweet and fair and pure as they
were hideous and foul. We met in the meads--she and I. Spring was the
time--God! It seems but yesterday!--and each in our bearing towards the
other forgot the traditions of the names we bore. And as at first we had
met by chance, so did we meet later by contrivance, not once or twice,
but many times. God, how sweet she was! How sweet was all the world! How
sweet it was to live and to be young! We loved. How else could it
have been? What to us were traditions, what to us the hatred that for
centuries had held our families asunder? In us it lay to set aside all
that.

"And so I sought my father. He cursed me at first for an unnatural son
who left unheeded the dictates of our blood. But anon, when on my
knees I had urged my cause with all the eloquent fervour that is but
of youth--youth that loves--my father cursed no more. His thoughts went
back maybe to the days of his own youth, and he bade me rise and go
a-wooing as I listed. Nay, more than that he did. The first of our name
was he out o