. What period and country are they to represent?'

His father didn't know. He had never looked at the play of late years.
It was 'Love's Labour's Lost.' 'You had better read it for yourself,' he
said, 'and do the best you can.'

During the morning Somerset junior found time to refresh his memory of
the play, and afterwards went and hunted up materials for designs to
suit the same, which occupied his spare hours for the next three days.
As these occupations made no great demands upon his reasoning faculties
he mostly found his mind wandering off to imaginary scenes at Stancy
Castle: particularly did he dwell at this time upon Paula's lively
interest in the history, relics, tombs, architecture,--nay, the very
Christian names of the De Stancy line, and her 'artistic' preference
for Charlotte's ancestors instead of her own. Yet what more natural
than that a clever meditative girl, encased in the feudal lumber of
that family, should imbibe at least an antiquarian interest in it?
Human nature at bottom is romantic rather than ascetic, and the local
habitation which accident had provided for Paula was perhaps acting as
a solvent of the hard, morbidly introspective views thrust upon her in
early life.

Somerset wondered if his own possession of a substantial genealogy
like Captain De Stancy's would have had any appreciable effect upon her
regard for him. His suggestion to Paula of her belonging to a worthy
strain of engineers had been based on his content with his own
intellectual line of descent through Pheidias, Ictinus and Callicrates,
Chersiphron, Vitruvius, Wilars of Cambray, William of Wykeham, and
the rest of that long and illustrious roll; but Miss Power's marked
preference for an animal pedigree led him to muse on what he could show
for himself in that kind.

These thoughts so far occupied him that when he took the sketches to
his father, on the morning of the fifth, he was led to ask: 'Has any one
ever sifted out our family pedigree?'

'Family pedigree?'

'Yes. Have we any pedigree worthy to be compared with that of
professedly old families? I never remember hearing of any ancestor
further back than my great-grandfather.'

Somerset the elder reflected and said that he believed there was a
genealogical tree about the house somewhere, reaching back to a very
respectable distance. 'Not that I ever took much interest in it,' he
continued, without looking up from his canvas; 'but your great uncle
John was a man wi