ring the sermon, and sat with his arm round his brother's neck.

Harry had proceeded in his narrative after his own fashion,
interspersing it with many youthful ejaculations, and answering a number
of incidental questions asked by his listener. The old lady seemed never
tired of hearing him. Her amiable hostess and her daughters came more
than once, to ask if she would ride, or walk, or take a dish of tea, or
play a game at cards; but all these amusements Madam Bernstein declined,
saying that she found infinite amusement in Harry's conversation.
Especially when any of the Castlewood family were present, she redoubled
her caresses, insisted upon the lad speaking close to her ear, and would
call out to the others, "Hush, my dears! I can't hear our cousin speak."
And they would quit the room, striving still to look pleased.

"Are you my cousin, too?" asked the honest boy. "You see kinder than my
other cousins."

Their talk took place in the wainscoted parlour, where the family had
taken their meals in ordinary for at least two centuries past, and
which, as we have said, was hung with portraits of the race. Over
Madam Bernstein's great chair was a Kneller, one of the most brilliant
pictures of the gallery, representing a young lady of three or four
and twenty, in the easy flowing dress and loose robes of Queen Anne's
time--a hand on a cushion near her, a quantity of auburn hair parted off
a fair forehead, and flowing over pearly shoulders and a lovely neck.
Under this sprightly picture the lady sate with her knitting-needles.

When Harry asked, "Are you my cousin, too?" she said, "That picture is
by Sir Godfrey, who thought himself the greatest painter in the world.
But he was not so good as Lely, who painted your grandmother--my--my
Lady Castlewood, Colonel Esmond's wife; nor he so good as Sir Anthony
Van Dyck, who painted your great-grandfather, yonder--and who looks,
Harry, a much finer gentleman than he was. Some of us are painted
blacker than we are. Did you recognise your grandmother in that picture?
She had the loveliest fair hair and shape of any woman of her time."

"I fancied I knew the portrait from instinct, perhaps, and a certain
likeness to my mother."

"Did Mrs. Warrington--I beg her pardon, I think she calls herself Madam
or my Lady Esmond now----?"

"They call my mother so in our province," said the boy.

"Did she never tell you of another daughter her mother had in England,
before she married you