many grim secrets of feudal times. How many drinking orgies
and all-night card parties had been held within its portals, I dared
not endeavour to surmise. As to how many plots had been hatched behind
its studded doors, how many affairs of honour had been settled for all
time under its high-panelled roof,--there was only a meagre record; but
those we knew of had been bloody and not a few.

Figures, in suits of armour, stood in every corner; two-edged swords,
shields of brass and cowhide, blunderbusses and breech-loading pistols
hung from the walls, while the more modern rifles and fowling pieces
were ranged in orderly fashion along the far side.

The light was none too good in there, and I failed, at first, to
discover the object of my quest.

"How do, farmer Giles?" came that slow, drawling, sarcastic voice which
I knew so well.

I turned suddenly, and,--there he was, seated on a brass-studded oak
chest almost behind the heavy door, swinging one leg and toying with a
seventeenth century rapier. Through his narrow-slitted eyes, he was
examining me from top to toe in apparent disgust: tall, thin, perfectly
groomed, handsome, cynical, devil-may-care.

I tried to speak calmly, but my anger was greater than I could properly
control. Poor little Peggy Darrol was uppermost in my thoughts.

"'Gad, George,--you look like a tramp. Why don't you spruce up a bit?
Hobnailed boots, home-spun breeches; ugh! it's enough to make your
noble ancestors turn in their coffins and groan.

"Don't you know the Brammerton motto is, 'Clean,--within and without.'"

He bent the blade of his rapier until it formed a half hoop, then he
let it fly back with a twang.

"And some of us have degenerated so," I answered, "that we apply the
motto only in so far as it affects the outside."

"While some of us, of course, are so busy scrubbing and polishing at
our inwards," he put in, "that we have no time to devote to the parts
that are seen. But that seems to me deuced like cant; and a cheap
variety of it at that.

"So you have taken to preaching, as well as farming. Fine combination,
little brother! However, George,--dear boy,--we shall let it go at
that. There is something you are anxious to unload. Get it out of
your system, man."

"I have just been hearing that you are going to marry Lady Rosemary
Granton soon."

"Why, yes! of course. You may congratulate me, for I have that
distinguished honour," he drawled.

"And you _do_ c