n a promontory of the land.

As our car went thundering up to the great hall door nearly the whole of
the servants and some of the tenant farmers (under the direction of the
tall, sallow man who had been my husband's guardian in former days, and
was now his steward) were waiting to welcome us, as well as Lady
Margaret Anselm, who was still reserved and haughty in her manner,
though pleasant enough with me.

My husband nodded to all, shook hands with some, presented Alma to his
aunt as "one of Mary's old school friends," (a designation which, as I
could see, had gone ahead of her) and then we passed into the house.

I found the inside corresponded with the outside in its appearance of
neglect and decay, the big square hall having rusty and disjointed
armour on its wainscotted walls and the mark of water on the floor,
which had come from a glass dome over the well of the stairs, for it had
rained while we were on the sea.

The drawing-room had faded curtains over the windows, faded velvet on
the square sofa and stiff chairs, faded carpets, faded samplers, and
faded embroidery on faded screens.

The dining-room (the sedate original of my father's rather garish copy)
was a panelled chamber, hung round with rubicund portraits of the male
O'Neills from the early ones of the family who had been Lords of Ellan
down to the "bad Lord Raa," who had sworn at my grandmother on the high
road.

I felt as if no woman could have made her home here for at least a
hundred years, and I thought the general atmosphere of the house was
that of the days when spendthrift noblemen, making the island a refuge
from debt, spent their days in gambling and their nights in drinking
bumpers from bowls of whiskey punch to the nameless beauties they had
left "in town."

They were all gone, all dead as the wood of the worm-eaten wainscotting,
but the sound of their noisy merry-making seemed to cling to the rafters
still, and as I went up to my rooms the broad oaken staircase seemed to
be creaking under their drunken footsteps.

My own apartments, to which Lady Margaret conducted me, were on the
southern side of the house--a rather stuffy bedroom with walls covered
by a kind of pleated chintz, and a boudoir with a stone balcony that had
a flight of steps going down to a terrace of the garden, which
overlooked a glen and had a far view of the sea.

On the opposite side of the landing outside (which was not immediately
off the great staircase thou