nt--, such as the
story of the Scarlet Nuns, the abominable story of the Spotted Dog,
or the thing that was done in the quarry. And all this red roll of
impieties came from his thin, genteel lips rather primly than otherwise,
as he sat sipping the wine out of his tall, thin glass.

I could see that the big man opposite me was trying, if anything,
to stop him; but he evidently held the old gentleman in considerable
respect, and could not venture to do so at all abruptly. And the little
priest at the other end of the-table, though free from any such air of
embarrassment, looked steadily at the table, and seemed to listen to the
recital with great pain--as well as he might.

"You don't seem," I said to the narrator, "to be very fond of the Exmoor
pedigree."

He looked at me a moment, his lips still prim, but whitening and
tightening; then he deliberately broke his long pipe and glass on the
table and stood up, the very picture of a perfect gentleman with the
framing temper of a fiend.

"These gentlemen," he said, "will tell you whether I have cause to like
it. The curse of the Eyres of old has lain heavy on this country, and
many have suffered from it. They know there are none who have suffered
from it as I have." And with that he crushed a piece of the fallen
glass under his heel, and strode away among the green twilight of the
twinkling apple-trees.

"That is an extraordinary old gentleman," I said to the other two; "do
you happen to know what the Exmoor family has done to him? Who is he?"

The big man in black was staring at me with the wild air of a baffled
bull; he did not at first seem to take it in. Then he said at last,
"Don't you know who he is?"

I reaffirmed my ignorance, and there was another silence; then the
little priest said, still looking at the table, "That is the Duke of
Exmoor."

Then, before I could collect my scattered senses, he added equally
quietly, but with an air of regularizing things: "My friend here is
Doctor Mull, the Duke's librarian. My name is Brown."

"But," I stammered, "if that is the Duke, why does he damn all the old
dukes like that?"

"He seems really to believe," answered the priest called Brown, "that
they have left a curse on him." Then he added, with some irrelevance,
"That's why he wears a wig."

It was a few moments before his meaning dawned on me. "You don't mean
that fable about the fantastic ear?" I demanded. "I've heard of it, of
course, but surely it must be