wide arm of Ricky's chair and with her only
too willing aid set to work. Val eyed them drowsily. Rupert and
Ricky--or to give her her very formal name in full--Richanda Anne, were
"Red" Ralestones, possessing the thin, three-cornered faces, the dark
mahogany hair, the sharply defined cheek-bones which had been the mark
of the family as far back in history as portraits or written
descriptions existed. The "Red" Ralestones were marked also by height
and a suppleness of body and movement. The men had been fine swordsmen,
the ladies noted beauties. But they were also cursed, Val remembered
vividly, with uncertain tempers.

Rupert had schooled himself to the point where his emotions were
mastered by his will. But Val had seen Ricky enjoy full tantrums, and
the last occasion was not so long ago that the scene had become misty in
his memory. Generous to the point of self-beggary, loyal to a fault, and
incurably romantic, that was a "Red" Ralestone.

Val himself was a "Black" Ralestone, which was a very different thing.
They were a new growth on the family tree, a growth which appeared after
the Ralestones had been exiled to colonial America. His black hair, his
long, dark face of no particular beauty marked with straight, black
brows set in a perpetual frown--that was the sign of a "Black"
Ralestone. They were as strong-willed as the "Reds," but their anger
could be controlled to icy rage.

"Now that you have spent the monthly income," Val suggested as Rupert
added up a long column of minute figures scrawled across the first page
of his pocket note-book, "let's really get away from economics for one
evening. The surroundings suggest something more romantic than dollars
and cents. After all, when did a pirate ever show a saving disposition?
Would the first Roderick--"

"The Roderick who brought home the Luck?" Ricky laughed. "But he brought
home a fortune, too, didn't he, Rupert?"

Her brother relit his pipe. "Yes, but a great many lords came home from
the Crusades with their pockets filled. Sir Roderick de la Stone thought
the Luck worth his entire estate even after he was made Baron
Ralestone."

Ricky shivered delicately. "Not altogether nice people, those ancestors
of ours," she observed.

"No," Val grinned. "By rights this room should be full of ghosts instead
of the beat of just one. How many Ralestones died violently? Seven or
eight, wasn't it?"

"But the ones who died in England should haunt Lorne," argued Rick