nd torn banners.

Here, among a group of rough-looking servants, a tall old man in a
nightcap and furred gown was giving orders in a loud passionate voice.
This personage, who was of a choleric complexion, with a face like
mottled red marble, seized Odo by the wrist and led him up a flight of
stairs so worn and slippery that he tripped at every step; thence down a
corridor and into a gloomy apartment where three ladies shivered about a
table set with candles. Bidden by the old gentleman to salute his
grandmother and great-aunts, Odo bowed over three wrinkled hands, one
fat and soft as a toad's stomach, the others yellow and dry as
lemon-skins. His mother embraced the ladies in the same humble manner,
and the Marquess, first furiously calling for supper, thrust Odo down on
a stool in the ingle.

From this point of observation the child, now vividly awake, noted the
hangings of faded tapestry that heaved in the draught, the ceiling of
beams and the stone floor strewn with rushes. The candle-light
flickering on the faces of his aged relatives showed his grandmother to
be a pale heavy-cheeked person with little watchful black eyes which she
dropped at her husband's approach; while the two great-aunts, seated
side by side in high-backed chairs with their feet on braziers, reminded
Odo of the narrow elongated saints squeezed into the niches of a
church-door. The old Marchioness wore the high coif and veil of the
previous century; the aunts, who, as Odo afterwards learned, were
canonesses of a noble order, were habited in a semi-conventual dress,
with crosses hanging on their bosoms; and none spoke but when the
Marquess addressed them.

Their timidity appeared to infect Odo's mother, who, from her habitual
volubility of temper, sank to a mood of like submissiveness. A supper of
venison and goat's cheese was not designed to restore her spirits, and
when at length she and Odo had withdrawn to their cavernous bedchamber,
she flung herself weeping on the bed and declared she must die if she
remained long in this prison.

Falling asleep under such influences, it was the more wonderful to Odo
to wake with the sun on his counterpane, a sweet noise of streams
through the casement and the joyous barking of hounds in the castle
court. From the window-seat he looked out on a scene extraordinarily
novel to his lowland eyes. The chamber commanded the wooded steep below
the castle, with a stream looping its base; beyond, the pastures sl