relessly, as it pleased her fancy. She
had precious old laces, too, almost worth their weight in diamonds; laces
which had been snatched from altars in ancient Spanish cathedrals during
the wars, and which it would not be safe to leave a duchess alone with
for ten minutes. The old house was fat with the deposits of rich
generations which had gone before. The famous "golden" fire-set was a
purchase of one of the family who had been in France during the
Revolution, and must have come from a princely palace, if not from one of
the royal residences. As for silver, the iron closet which had been made
in the dining-room wall was running over with it: tea-kettles,
coffee-pots, heavy-lidded tankards, chafing-dishes, punch-bowls, all that
all the Dudleys had ever used, from the caudle-cup which used to be
handed round the young mother's chamber, and the porringer from which
children scooped their bread-and-milk with spoons as solid as ingots, to
that ominous vessel, on the upper shelf, far back in the dark, with a
spout like a slender italic S, out of which the sick and dying, all along
the last century, and since, had taken the last drops that passed their
lips. Without being much of a scholar, Dick could see well enough, too,
that the books in the library had been ordered from the great London
houses, whose imprint they bore, by persons who knew what was best and
meant to have it. A man does not require much learning to feel pretty
sure, when he takes one of those solid, smooth, velvet-leaved quartos,
say a Baskerville Addison, for instance, bound in red morocco, with a
margin of gold as rich as the embroidery of a prince's collar, as Vandyck
drew it,--he need not know much to feel pretty sure that a score or two
of shelves full of such books mean that it took a long purse, as well as
a literary taste, to bring them together.

To all these attractions the mind of this thoughtful young gentleman may
be said to have been fully open. He did not disguise from himself,
however, that there were a number of drawbacks in the way of his becoming
established as the heir of the Dudley mansion-house and fortune. In the
first place, Cousin Elsie was, unquestionably, very piquant, very
handsome, game as a hawk, and hard to please, which made her worth trying
for. But then there was something about Cousin Elsie,--(the small, white
scars began stinging, as he said this to himself, and he pushed his
sleeve up to look at them)--there wa