Grenadier Guards asked the one who was in the Blues if 'the Governor
was going in for zoology or lion-taming in his old age'; but the
brother in the Blues said it was 'Maud who liked freaks of nature, and
Greeks, and things, because they were so amusing to photograph.'

At all events, Lady Maud had studiously left out her brothers and
sisters in making up the Craythew party, a larger one than had been
assembled there for many years; it was so large indeed that the
'freaks' would not have been prominent figures at all, even if they
had been such unusual persons as the young man in the Blues imagined
them.

For though Lord Creedmore was not a rich peer, Craythew was a fine old
place, and could put up at least thirty guests without crowding them
and without causing that most uncomfortable condition of things in
which people run over each other from morning to night during week-end
parties in the season, when there is no hunting or shooting to keep
the men out all day. The house itself was two or three times as big as
Mr. Van Torp's at Oxley Paddox. It had its hall, its long drawing-room
for dancing, its library, its breakfast-room and its morning-room, its
billiard-room, sitting-room, and smoking-room, like many another big
English country house; but it had also a picture gallery, the library
was an historical collection that filled three good-sized rooms, and
it was completed by one which had always been called the study, beyond
which there were two little dwelling-rooms, at the end of the wing,
where the librarian had lived when there had been one. For the old
lord had been a bachelor and a book lover, but the present master of
the house, who was tremendously energetic and practical, took care of
the books himself. Now and then, when the house was almost full, a
guest was lodged in the former librarian's small apartment, and on the
present occasion Paul Griggs was to be put there, on the ground that
he was a man of letters and must be glad to be near books, and
also because he could not be supposed to be afraid of Lady Letitia
Foxwell's ghost, which was believed to have spent the nights in the
library for the last hundred and fifty years, more or less, ever since
the unhappy young girl had hanged herself there in the time of George
the Second, on the eve of her wedding day.

The ancient house stood more than a mile from the high road, near the
further end of such a park as is rarely to be seen, even in beautiful
Der