se the fact.

No, emphatically Marshall had not the faintest desire to have to inform
the old man that harm had befallen Master Piers, and his frown deepened
as he trudged up his little garden and heard the yelling voice and
galloping hoofs grow faint in the distance.

"The boy is madder even than his father was," he muttered darkly. "Bad
stock! Bad stock!"

He shook his head over the words, and went within. He was the only man
left on the estate who could remember the beautiful young Italian bride
whom Sir Beverley had once upon a time brought to reign there. It had
been a short, short reign, and no one spoke of it now,--least of all the
old, bent man who ruled like a feudal lord at Rodding Abbey, and of whom
even the redoubtable Marshall himself stood in awe.

But Marshall remembered her well, and it was upon that dazzling memory
that his thoughts dwelt when he gave utterance to his mysterious verdict.
For was not Master Piers the living image of her? Had he not the same
imperial bearing and regal turn of the head? Did not the Evesham blood
run the hotter in his veins for that passionate Southern strain that
mingled with it?

Marshall sometimes wondered how Sir Beverley with his harsh intolerance
brooked the living likeness of the boy to the woman in whose bitter
memory he hated all women. It was scarcely possible that he blinded
himself to it. It was too vividly apparent for that. "A perpetual
eyesore," Marshall termed it in private. But then there was no accounting
for the ways of folk in high places. Marshall did not pretend to
understand them. He was, in his own grumpy fashion, sincerely attached to
his master, and he never presumed to criticize his doings. He only
wondered at them.

As for Master Piers, he had been an unmitigated nuisance to him
personally ever since he had learned to walk alone. Marshall had always
disapproved of him, and he hated Victor, the French valet, who had
brought him up from his cradle. Yet deep in his surly old heart there
lurked a certain grudging affection for him notwithstanding. The boy
had a winning way with him, and but for his hatred of Victor, who was
soft and womanish, but extremely tenacious, Marshall would have liked
to have had a hand in his upbringing. As it was, he could only look on
from afar and condemn the vagaries of "that dratted boy," prophesying
disaster whenever he saw him and hoping that Sir Beverley might not
live to see it. Certainly it seemed as if Pier