by the celebrated academician--and humorist--who
had executed the painting. Soft black hat, flat black tie, and
ill-fitting frock coat might readily have been identified by the
respectable but unfashionable tradesmen patronised by Sir Jacques.

Paul, pipe in mouth, confronting the likeness after dinner, recalled,
and smiled at the recollection, a saying of Don's: "Never trust a
whiskered man who wears a soft black felt hat and a black frock coat.
The hat conceals the horns; the coat hides the tail!"

From room to room he rambled, and even up into the octagonal turret
chambers in the tower. Here he seemed to be rid of the aura of the
dining-room portrait and in a rarefied atmosphere of Tudor turbulence.
In one of the turret chambers, that overlooking the orchard, he found
himself surveying the distant parkland with the eyes of a captive and
longing for the coming of one who ever tarried yet was ever expected.
The long narrow gallery over the main entrance, with its six mullioned
windows and fine collection of paintings, retained, as a jar that has
held musk retains its scent, a faint perfume of Jacobean gallantry. But
the pictures, many of them undraped studies collected by Sir Jacques,
which now held the place once sacred to ancestors, cast upon the gallery
a vague shadow of the soft black hat.

From a tiny cabinet at one end of the gallery a stair led down to my
lady's garden where bushes masqueraded as birds, a sundial questioned
the smiling moon and a gathering of young frogs leapt hastily from the
stone fountain at sound of Paul's footsteps. Monkish herbs and
sweet-smelling old-world flowers grew modestly in this domain once
sacred to the chatelaine of Hatton; and Paul kept ghostly tryst with a
white-shouldered lady whose hair was dressed high upon her head, and
powdered withal, and to whose bewitching red lips the amorous glance was
drawn by a patch cunningly placed beside a dimple. My lady's garden was
a reliquary of soft whispers, and Paul by the magic of his genius
reclaimed them all and was at once the lover and the mistress.

In the depths of the house he found a delightful dungeon. More modern
occupiers of Hatton had used the dungeon as a wine-cellar and Sir
Jacques had converted it to the purposes of a dark-room, for he had been
a skilful and enthusiastic amateur of photography; but that it had at
some period of its history served other ends, Paul's uncanny instinct
told him. A sense of chill, not physica