nged to
the prospective heirs of the Ingleton family. And that family could
trace back through many centuries to days of civil wars and service for
king and country, to crusades and deeds of chivalry, and even to
far-away ancestors who gave counsel at Saxon Witenagemots. Norman keep
had succeeded wooden manor, and that in its turn had given place to a
Tudor dwelling, and both had finally merged into a long Georgian
mansion, with straight rows of windows and a classic porch, not so
picturesque as the older buildings, but very convenient and comfortable
from a modern point of view. The lovely gardens, with their clipped yew
hedges, were one of the sights of the neighborhood, and it was a family
satisfaction that the view from the terrace over park, wood, and stream
showed not a single acre of land that was not their own.

Mr. Leslie Ingleton, a fine type of the old-fashioned, kindly, but
autocratic English squire, belonged to a bygone generation, and found it
difficult to move with the march of the times. Because he had spent his
seventy-four years of life on the soil of Cheverley, the people
tolerated in "the ould squire" many things that they would not have
passed over in a younger man or a stranger. They shrugged their
shoulders and gave way to his well-meant tyranny, for man and boy,
everybody on the estate had experienced his kindness and realized his
good intentions towards his tenants.

"If he does fly off at a tangent, ten to one Miss Clare'll be down the
next day and set all straight again," was the general verdict on his
frequent outbursts.

Cheverley Chase would have been quite incomplete without Cousin Clare.
She was a second cousin of the Ingletons, who had come to tend
Grandmother in her last illness, and after her death had remained to
take charge of the household and the newly-arrived family of
grandchildren. She was one of those calm, quiet, big-souled women who in
the early centuries would have been a saint, and in mediaeval times the
abbess of a nunnery, but happening to be born in the nineteenth century,
her mental outlook had a modern bias, and both her philanthropy and her
religious instincts had developed along the latest lines of thought. She
had schemes of her own for work in the world, but at present she was
doing the task that was nearest in helping to bring up the motherless
children who had been placed temporarily in her care. To manage this
rather turbulent crew, soothe the irascible old S