l breastplate was an admiral in Charles the
Second's reign, and was made a baronet for his valiant behaviour when
the Dutch fleet were at Chatham. The baronetcy died with his son, who
left only daughters. The eldest married a Mr. Percival, who took the
name of Tempest, and sat for the borough of----Perhaps Mrs. Scobel
knows. I have such a bad memory for these things; though I have heard
my dear husband talk about them often."

Captain Winstanley looked round the great oak-panelled hall dreamily,
and heard very little of Mrs. Tempest's vague prattling about her
husband's ancestors.

What a lovely old place, he was thinking. A house that would give a man
importance in the land, supported, as it was, by an estate bringing in
something between five and six thousand a year. How much military
distinction, how many battles must a soldier win before he could make
himself master of such a fortune?

"And it needed but for that girl to like me, and a little gold ring
would have given me the freehold of it all," thought Conrad Winstanley
bitterly.

How many penniless girls, or girls with fortunes so far beneath the
measure of a fine gentleman's needs as to be useless, had been over
head and ears in love with the elegant Captain; how many pretty girls
had tempted him by their beauty and winsomeness to be false to his
grand principle that marriage meant promotion. And here was an
obstinate minx who would have realised all his aims, and whom he felt
himself able to love to distraction into the bargain; and, behold, some
adverse devil had entered into her mind, and made Conrad Winstanley
hateful to her.

"It's like witchcraft," he said to himself. "Why should this one woman
be different from all other women? Perhaps it's the colour. That ruddy
auburn hair, the loveliest I ever saw, means temper. But I conquered
the chestnut, and I'll conquer Miss Tempest--or make her smart for it."

"A handsome music-gallery, is it not?" said the widow. "The carved
balustrade is generally admired."

Then they went into the dining-room, and looked cursorily at about a
dozen large dingy pictures of the Italian school, which a man who knew
anything about art would have condemned at a glance. Fine examples of
brown varnish, all of them. Thence to the library, lined with its
carved-oak dwarf bookcases, containing books which nobody had opened
for a generation--Livy, Gibbon, Hume, Burke, Smollett, Plutarch,
Thomson. These sages, clad in shiny brown