housekeeper had made very light of it, hurrying us back to look
at some armour over the chimneypiece in the next room. It was her
master's study, she had said, and was not generally shown to
strangers.

It was a small dark-looking room, lined with dingily-bound books
upon heavy carved-oak shelves, and with no other furniture than a
massive writing-table and three or four arm-chairs. Over the
mantelpiece, which was modern and low, there was a portrait of a
young man with a dark handsome face, and it was at this that Augusta
Darrell was looking. I could see her face in profile as she stood
upon the hearth with her clenched hand upon the mantelpiece, and I
had never before seen such an expression in any human countenance.

What was it? Despair, remorse, regret? I know not; but it was a look
of keenest anguish, of unutterable sorrow. The face was deadly pale,
the great gray eyes looking upwards at the portrait, the lips locked
together rigidly.

She did not hear my footstep; it was only when I spoke to her that
she turned towards me with a stony face, and asked what I wanted.

I told her that Mr. Darrell had sent me.

'I was coming this instant,' she said, resuming her usual manner
with an effort. 'I had only loitered to look at that portrait. A
fine face, is it not, Miss Crofton?'

'A handsome one, at any rate,' I answered doubtfully, for that dark
haughty countenance struck me as rather repellent than attractive.

'That's as much as to say you don't think it a good face. Well,
perhaps you are right. It reminded me of some one I knew a long time
ago, and was rather interesting to me on that account. And then I
fell into a kind of a reverie, and forgot that my dear husband might
miss me.'

He came into the room as she was saying this. She told him that she
had stopped to look at the portrait, and asked whose it was.

'It is a likeness of Angus Egerton, the present owner of the
Priory,' Mr. Darrell answered; 'and a very good likeness, too--of as
bad a man as ever lived, I believe,' he added in a lower voice.

'A bad man?'

'Yes; he broke his mother's heart.'

'In what manner?'

'He fell in love with a girl of low birth, whom he met in the course
of a pedestrian tour in the West of England, and was going to marry
her, I believe, when Mrs. Egerton got wind of the affair. She was a
very proud woman--one of the most resolute masculine-minded women I
ever knew. She went down into Devonshire where the girl lived