looking at a portrait, and wondered how Mary would like her new home. It
was not an old house, nor had the Quinns lived in it from the time it
was built, and so Henry could not feel about it what Ninian must have
felt about Boveyhayne Manor, in which his ancestors had lived for four
centuries. But it was his home, in which he had been born, in which his
mother and father had died, and it seemed to him to be as full of
memories and tradition as Mary's home. The war had broken the line of
Grahams, broken a tradition that had survived the dangers of four
hundred years. That seemed to Henry to be a pity. Perhaps, he thought,
this worship of Family is a foolish thing. There was a danger in being
rooted to one place, in letting your blood become too closely mingled,
and a tradition might very well become a substitute for life; but when
all that was said and admitted, there was a pride in one's breeding that
made life seem like a sacrament, and the years but the rungs of a long
ladder. Once, in the days of the Bloomsbury house, they had talked of
tradition, and some one had related the old story of the American
tourist who was shown the sacred light, and told that it had not been
out for hundreds of years. "Well, I guess it's out now!" the American
replied, blowing the light out. They had made a mock of the horrified
priest and had protested that his service to the flame was a waste of
life and energy and time. And when they had said all that they had to
say, Ninian, speaking more quietly than was his wont, had interjected,
"But don't you think the American was rather a cad?"

They had argued fiercely then, some of them protesting that the
American's disregard of a worn convention was splendid, virile,
youthful, god-like. Roger, Henry remembered, had sided with Ninian so
far as to admit that the American's behaviour had been too
inconsiderate. "He might have discussed the matter with the priest ...
tried to persuade him to blow it out himself!" but that was as far as he
would go with Ninian.

"I admit," Ninian had retorted, "that it was a foolish tradition ... but
don't you think the American was rather a cad. It was better, wasn't it,
to have that tradition than to have none at all?"

Now, standing here, in this house that had been his father's, and now
was his, and would, in due time, be his son's, if ever he should have a
son, it seemed to him that Ninian had been right in his contention. And
just as Mary, moving throug