Jeffray left his mare at the stables and entered the house by the side door from the garden. The old priory of Rodenham was one of those dream-houses that seem built up out of the idyls of the past. It was full of long galleries, dark entries, beams, recessed windows, huge cupboards, and winding stairs. Casements glimmered in unexpected places. The rooms led one into the other at all angles, and were rarely on a level. Here were panels black with age, phantasmal beds, carved chests that might have tombed mysteries for centuries, faded tapestries that breathed forth tragedy as they waved upon the walls. All was dark, mellow, stately, silent. The very essences of life seemed to have melted into the stones; the deep throes of the human heart had become as echoes in each solemn room. Jeffray found the Lady Letitia, his aunt, playing piquet in the damask drawing-room with Dr. Sugg, the rector of Rodenham. The Lady Letitia was a red-beaked and bushy browed old vulture, with wicked eyes and a budding beard. Her towering “head” was stuffed full of ribbons and feathers, her stupendous hoop of red damask, her gown flowered red and blue. The Lady Letitia was one of those preposterous old ladies who labor under the delusion that a woman of sixty may still presume to trade upon the reputation of impudent loveliness she had created some thirty years ago. Everything about the Lady Letitia was false and artificial. Her teeth and eyebrows were emblems of what her virtues were, manufactured articles to make the wearer passable in society. The old lady had deigned to drive down from London in her coach-and-four to spend Christmas with her nephew, a piece of affectionate economy necessitated by heavy losses at cards. She had deigned also to take Richard’s education in hand. The lad was deplorably quiet, gauche, and sensitive. “So you are back at last, Richard,” she said, looking like a pompous old parrot, with one eye on her cards and one on her nephew. “Seat yourself, Dr. Sugg; Richard does not want you to stand on ceremony. Snowing, eh? Detestable weather; the country is like a quagmire already, as I may see by your coat and breeches, nephew. It is usual for a gentleman to dress before presenting himself to a lady. You look surprised, Richard. ‘Is it not my own house?’ you say. Certainly, mon cher, so it is, but I am a lady of birth, sir, and I like to be treated as such. How is Mistress Jilian? Deft at the harpsichord as ever?”