sunbaked prairie, rushed upon him. There,
too, had lain the weapons of the departed chieftain; there, too, lay the
Indian's "faithful hound," here simulated by the cross-legged
crusader's canine effigy. And now, strangest of all, he found that this
unlooked-for recollection and remembrance thrilled him more at that
moment than the dead before him. Here they rested,--the Atherlys of
centuries; recumbent in armor or priestly robes, upright in busts that
were periwigged or hidden in long curls, above the marble record of
their deeds and virtues. Some of these records were in Latin,--an
unknown tongue to Peter,--some in a quaint English almost as
unintelligible; but none as foreign to him as the dead themselves. Their
banners waved above his head; their voices filled the silent church, but
fell upon his vacant eye and duller ear. He was none of them.

Presently he was conscious of a footstep, so faint, so subtle, that it
might have come from a peregrinating ghost. He turned quickly and saw
Lady Elfrida, half bold, yet half frightened, halting beside a pillar
of the chancel. But there was nothing of the dead about her: she was
radiating and pulsating with the uncompromising and material freshness
of English girlhood. The wild rose in the hedgerow was not more tangible
than her cheek, nor the summer sky more clearly cool and blue than her
eyes. The vigor of health and unfettered freedom of limb was in her
figure from her buckled walking-shoe to her brown hair topped by a
sailor hat. The assurance and contentment of a well-ordered life, of
secured position and freedom from vain anxieties or expectations, were
visible in every line of her refined, delicate, and evenly quiescent
features. And yet Lady Elfrida, for the first time in her girlhood, felt
a little nervous.

Yet she was frank, too, with the frankness of those who have no thought
of being misunderstood. She said she had come there out of curiosity to
see how he would "get on" with his ancestors. She had been watching him
from the chancel ever since he came,--and she was disappointed. As far
as emotion went she thought he had the advantage of the stoniest and
longest dead of them all. Perhaps he did not like them? But he must be
careful what he SAID, for some of her own people were there,--manifestly
this one. (She put the toe of her buckled shoe on the crusader Peter had
just looked at.) And then there was another in the corner. So she had a
right to come there as wel