omfort. Later she discovered the reason for this grim
severity of arrangement. No woman's touch had softened it for close
upon half a century.

She went back to her own room and dressed. Piers had wanted her to have a
maid, but she had refused until other changes should be made in the
establishment. There seemed so much to alter that she felt bewildered. A
household of elderly menservants presented a problem with which she knew
she would find it difficult to deal.

She put the matter gently before Piers that night, but he dismissed it
as trivial.

"You can't turn 'em off of course," he said. "But you can have a dozen
women to adjust the balance if you want 'em."

Avery did not, but she was too tired to argue the point. She let the
subject slide.

They dined together in the oak-panelled dining-room where Piers had so
often sat with his grandfather. The table seemed to stretch away
inimitably into shadows, and Avery felt like a Lilliputian. From the wall
directly facing her the last Lady Evesham smiled upon her--her baffling,
mirthless smile that seemed to cover naught but heartache. She found
herself looking up again and again to meet those eyes of mocking
comprehension; and the memory of what Lennox Tudor had once told her
recurred to her. This was Piers' Italian grandmother whose patrician
beauty had descended to him through her scapegrace son.

"Are you looking at that woman with the smile?" said Piers abruptly.

She turned to him. "You are so like her, Piers. But I wouldn't like you
to have a smile like that. There is something tragic behind it."

"We are a tragic family," said Piers sombrely. "As for her, she ruined
her own life and my grandfather's too. She might have been happy enough
with him if she had tried."

"Oh, Piers, I wonder!" Avery said, with a feeling that that smile
revealed more to her than to him.

"I say she might," Piers reiterated, with a touch of impatience. "He
thought the world of her, just as--just as--" he smiled at her
suddenly--"I do of you. He never knew that she wasn't satisfied until one
fine day she left him. She married again--afterwards, and then died. He
never got over it."

But still Avery had a vagrant feeling of pity for the woman who had been
Sir Beverley's bride. "I expect they never really understood each
other," she said.

Piers' dark eyes gleamed. "Do you know what I would have done if I had
been in his place?" he said. "I would have gone after her and brought