up to the dark, long portraits of the
extinguished race--one was a Holbein--and looked them in their sidelong
eyes. They looked back at us. We all, I know, felt the enigmatical
quality in them. Even my uncle was momentarily embarrassed, I think, by
that invincibly self-complacent expression. It was just as though, after
all, he had not bought them up and replaced them altogether; as though
that, secretly, they knew better and could smile at him.

The spirit of the place was akin to Bladesover, but touched with
something older and remoter. That armour that stood about had once
served in tilt-yards, if indeed it had not served in battle, and this
family had sent its blood and treasure, time after time, upon the most
romantic quest in history, to Palestine. Dreams, loyalties, place and
honour, how utterly had it all evaporated, leaving, at last, the final
expression of its spirit, these quaint painted smiles, these smiles
of triumphant completion! It had evaporated, indeed, long before the
ultimate Durgan had died, and in his old age he had cumbered the place
with Early Victorian cushions and carpets and tapestry table-cloths and
invalid appliances of a type even more extinct, it seemed to us, than
the crusades.... Yes, it was different from Bladesover.

"Bit stuffy, George," said my uncle. "They hadn't much idea of
ventilation when this was built."

One of the panelled rooms was half-filled with presses and a four-poster
bed. "Might be the ghost room," said my uncle; but it did not seem to
me that so retiring a family as the Durgans, so old and completely
exhausted a family as the Durgans, was likely to haunt anybody. What
living thing now had any concern with their honour and judgments and
good and evil deeds? Ghosts and witchcraft were a later innovation--that
fashion came from Scotland with the Stuarts.

Afterwards, prying for epitaphs, we found a marble crusader with a
broken nose, under a battered canopy of fretted stone, outside the
restricted limits of the present Duffield church, and half buried in
nettles. "Ichabod," said my uncle. "Eh? We shall be like that, Susan,
some day.... I'm going to clean him up a bit and put a railing to keep
off the children."

"Old saved at the eleventh hour," said my aunt, quoting one of the less
successful advertisements of Tono-Bungay.

But I don't think my uncle heard her.

It was by our captured crusader that the vicar found us. He came round
the corner at us briskly, a