is wondrous instrument--which looked not unlike an
ordinary pen--and making no attempt to disobey the desire that possessed
him, went back to the gallery. The dark splendid boy, the angelic little
girl were all he saw--even of the several children in that roll-call of
the past--and they seemed to look straight down his eyes into depths
where the fragmentary ghosts of unrecorded ancestors gave faint musical
response.

"The dead's kindly recognition of the dead," he thought. "But I wish
these children were alive."

For a week he haunted the gallery, and the children haunted him. Then he
became impatient and angry. "I am mooning like a barren woman," he
exclaimed. "I must take the briefest way of getting those youngsters off
my mind."

With the help of his secretary, he ransacked the library, and finally
brought to light the gallery catalogue which had been named in the
inventory. He discovered that his children were the Viscount Tancred and
the Lady Blanche Mortlake, son and daughter of the second Earl of
Teignmouth. Little wiser than before, he sat down at once and wrote to
the present earl, asking for some account of the lives of the children.
He awaited the answer with more restlessness than he usually permitted
himself, and took long walks, ostentatiously avoiding the gallery.

"I believe those youngsters have obsessed me," he thought, more than
once. "They certainly are beautiful enough, and the last time I looked
at them in that waning light they were fairly alive. Would that they
were, and scampering about this park."

Lord Teignmouth, who was intensely grateful to him, answered promptly.

"I am afraid," he wrote, "that I don't know much about my
ancestors--those who didn't do something or other; but I have a vague
remembrance of having been told by an aunt of mine, who lives on the
family traditions--she isn't married--that the little chap was drowned
in the river, and that the little girl died too--I mean when she was a
little girl--wasted away, or something--I'm such a beastly idiot about
expressing myself, that I wouldn't dare to write to you at all if you
weren't really great. That is actually all I can tell you, and I am
afraid the painter was their only biographer."

The author was gratified that the girl had died young, but grieved for
the boy. Although he had avoided the gallery of late, his practised
imagination had evoked from the throngs of history the high-handed and
brilliant, surely adventuro