He turned from the blaze outside, and looked back into the great shadowed room, in the recesses of which a beautiful twilight ever lingered. The sunlight filtered richly but dimly through the time-worn splendour of its high windows of painted glass, touching here and there inlaid panel and carved wainscoting, and laying a faint mosaic of varied colour on the black polished floor. It was a room which long association had invested with a kind of halo in John's eyes, far removed from the appreciative or ignorant admiration of the stranger, who saw in it only an unique Elizabethan relic. Artists worshipped it whenever they got the chance, went wild over the Tudor fan vaulting of the ceiling with its long pendants, and the quaint inlaid frets on the oak chimney-piece; talked learnedly of the panels above the wainscot, on which a series of genealogical trees were painted representing each of the wapentakes into which Yorkshire was divided, having shields on them with armorial bearings of the gentry of the county entitled in Elizabeth's time to bear arms. Strangers took note of these things, and spelt out the rather apocryphal marriages of the Tempests on the painted glass, or examined the date below the dial in the southern window with the name of the artist beneath it who had blazoned the arms.--_Bernard Diminckhoff fecit, 1585._ John knew every detail by heart, and saw them never, as a man in love with a noble woman gradually ceases to see beauty or the absence of beauty in brow and lip and eyelid, in adoration of the face itself which means so much to him. John's deep-set steady eyes absently followed the slow travelling of the coloured sunshine across the room. Overleigh had coloured his life as its painted glass was colouring the sunshine. It was bound up with his whole existence. The Tempest motto graven on the pane beside him, _Je le feray durant ma vie_, was graven on John's heart as indelibly. Mr. Tempest's dying words to him had never been forgotten. "It is an honour to be a Tempest. You are the head of the family. Do your duty by it." The words were sunk into the deep places of his mind. What the child had promised, the man was resolved to keep. His responsibility in the great position in which God had placed him, his duty, not only as a man, but as a Tempest, were the backbone of his religion--if those can be called religious who "trust high instincts more than all the creeds." The family motto had become a part of his life. It was perhaps the only oath of allegiance which John had ever taken. He turned towards the window again, against which his dark head had been resting. The old thoughts and resolutions so inextricably intertwined with the fibre of pride of birth, the old hopes and aspirations, matured during three years' absence, temporarily dormant during these months of illness, returned upon him with the unerring swiftness of swallows to the eaves. He pressed his hand upon the pane.