ed around the room, stopping at a window and going on,
stopping at another to stare out into the starless night. There had been
rain, and there was that haunting wet fragrance from the garden. "I must
see him," she said, and put her hand to her throat.

She went down-stairs. Everybody was in bed. There was no one to hear.
Her grandfather's room was over the library; Mandy and Calvin slept in
servants' quarters outside. To-morrow the house would be full of
ears--and it would be too late.

A faint light burned in the lower hall. The stairway swept down from a
sort of upper gallery, and all around the gallery and on the stairs and
along the lower hall were the portraits of Becky's dead and gone
ancestors.

They were really very worth-while ancestors, not as solid and
substantial perhaps as those whose portraits hung in the Meredith house
on Main Street in Nantucket, but none the less aristocratic, with a bit
of dare-devil about the men, and a hint of frivolity about the
women--with a pink coat here and a black patch there, with the sheen of
satin and the sparkle of jewels--a Cavalier crowd, with the greatest
ancestor of all in his curly wig and his sweeping plumes.

They stared at Becky as she went down-stairs, a little white figure in
her thin blue dressing-gown, her bronze hair twisted into a curly
topknot, her feet in small blue slippers.

The telephone was on a small table under the portrait of the greatest
grandfather. He had a high nose, and a fine clear complexion, and he
looked really very much alive as he gazed down at Becky.

She found the King's Crest number. It was a dreadful thing that she was
about to do. Yet she was going to do it.

She reached for the receiver. Then suddenly her hand was stayed, for it
seemed to her that into the silence her greatest grandfather shouted
accusingly:

_"Where is your pride?"_

She found herself trying to explain. "But, Grandfather----"

The clamour of other voices assailed her:

_"Where is your pride?"_

They were flinging the question at her from all sides, those gentlemen
in ruffles, those ladies in shining gowns.

Becky stood before them like a prisoner at the bar--a slight child, yet
with the look about her of those lovely ladies, and with eyes as clear
as those of the old Governor who had accused her.

"But I love him----"

It was no defense and she knew it. Not one of those lovely ladies would
have tried to call a lover back, not one of them but would