nd to be a good judge of paintings," said Kenelm, as
Cecilia paused beside him; "but it strikes me that this picture is very
much better than most of those to which places of honour are assigned in
your collection. And the face itself is so lovely that it would add an
embellishment to the princeliest galleries."

"Yes," said Cecilia, with a half-sigh. "The face is lovely, and the
portrait is considered one of Lely's rarest masterpieces. It used to
hang over the chimney-piece in the drawing-room. My father had it placed
here many years ago."

"Perhaps because he discovered it was not a family portrait?"

"On the contrary,--because it grieves him to think it is a family
portrait. Hush! I hear his footstep: don't speak of it to him; don't let
him see you looking at it. The subject is very painful to him."

Here Cecilia vanished into the china closet and Kenelm turned off to his
own room.

What sin committed by the original in the time of Charles II. but only
discovered in the reign of Victoria could have justified Leopold Travers
in removing the most pleasing portrait in the house from the honoured
place it had occupied, and banishing it to so obscure a recess? Kenelm
said no more on the subject, and indeed an hour afterwards had dismissed
it from his thoughts. The next day he rode out with Travers and
Cecilia. Their way passed through quiet shady lanes without any purposed
direction, when suddenly, at the spot where three of those lanes met on
an angle of common ground, a lonely gray tower, in the midst of a wide
space of grass-land which looked as if it had once been a park, with
huge boles of pollarded oak dotting the space here and there, rose
before them.

"Cissy!" cried Travers, angrily reining in his horse and stopping short
in a political discussion which he had forced upon Kenelm, "Cissy!
How comes this? We have taken the wrong turn! No matter, I see there,"
pointing to the right, "the chimney-pots of old Mondell's homestead. He
has not yet promised his vote to George Belvoir. I'll go and have a talk
with him. Turn back, you and Mr. Chillingly,--meet me at Terner's Green,
and wait for me there till I come. I need not excuse myself to you,
Chillingly. A vote is a vote." So saying, the Squire, whose ordinary
riding-horse was an old hunter, halted, turned, and, no gate being
visible, put the horse over a stiff fence and vanished in the direction
of old Mondell's chimney-pots. Kenelm, scarcely hearing his host's