powder everywhere! It's done the work, too, for there's
not a sign of moth. If I'm not careful, I'll stumble over the family
plate--it seems to be about the only thing wanting."

The mantelpiece, beneath the shrouded elk's head, was of gray marble
in which a crest was deeply carved. He went close and examined it. "A
sable greyhound, rampant, on a field argent," he said. "That's my own
crest, I suppose." There touched him again the same eery sensation
of acquaintance that had possessed him with his first sight of the
house-front. "Somehow it's familiar," he muttered; "where have I seen
it before?"

He thought a moment, then went quickly into the library and began to
ransack the trunk. At length he found a small box containing keepsakes
of various kinds. He poured the medley on to the table--an uncut
moonstone, an amethyst-topped pencil that one of his tutors had given
him as a boy, a tiger's claw, a compass and what-not. Among them was a
man's seal-ring with a crest cut in a cornelian. He looked at it
closely. It was the same device.

The ring had been his father's. Just when or how it had come into his
possession he could never remember. It had lain among these keepsakes so
many years that he had almost forgotten its existence. He had never worn
a ring, but now, as he went back to the hall, he slipped it on his
finger. The motto below the crest was worn away, but it showed clear in
the marble of the hall-mantel: _I clinge_.

His eyes turned from the carven words and strayed to the pleasant sunny
foliage outside. An arrogant boast, perhaps, yet in the event well
justified. Valiants had held that selfsame slope when the encircling
forests had rung with war-whoop and blazed with torture-fire. They had
held on through Revolution and Civil War. Good and bad, abiding and
lawless, every generation had cleaved stubbornly to its acres. _I
clinge._ His father had clung through absence that seemed to have been
almost exile, and now he, the last Valiant, was come to make good the
boast.

His gaze wavered. The tail of his eye had caught through the window a
spurt of something dashing and vivid, that grazed the corner of a
far-off field. He craned his neck, but it had passed the line of his
vision. The next moment, however, there came trailing on the satiny
stillness the high-keyed ululation of a horn, and an instant later a
long-drawn _hallo-o-o_! mixed with a pattering chorus of yelps.

He went close, and leaning from the s