They passed one canvas after another, Lord Benthorpe still holding and shading the candle, Mr Burden listening with intelligent respect to all he heard. This was Naples, that Lucerne; a third Nice, a fourth Mentone—all the strange, beautiful places Lord Benthorpe had admired in the course of his extensive travels: pictures ordered by him from local masters whose name still stood clearly inscribed in the bottom left-hand corner of their creations. There were portraits too. A very fine, but somewhat sinister figure, turbaned and sombre, was his great-aunt Kathleen, his grandfather’s only sister. His grandmother, represented as the Tragic Muse, filled amply the next frame; his grandfather the next. Standing in his robes against a fringed and tasselled velvet curtain of a rich purple hue with a broken pillar at his side, while a sunbeam bursting through a distant cloud, threw into fine relief the orator’s gesture, the Great Irishman was represented speaking in the House of Lords in favour of the reform of the Poor Law. His left hand touched with the index finger a map of Great Britain; his right was slightly raised to heaven in dignified appeal. A wolf-hound nestling at his feet indicated the domestic nature of his character, for the taste of that time permitted the allegory in spite of the grave improbability of such a creature’s presence in such a place and upon such an occasion. Towards the end of the corridor, before a painting more modern in treatment and hanging quite alone, they halted a moment in silence. It represented a woman yet young: hair of a colour similar to her own was caught up behind her head in those ordered masses once known as the Chignon; her skirt, which was most ample, was of a brilliant pink; she was seated writing at a superb escritoire, or writing-table, holding a graceful quill in a hand of which the little finger emerged coquettishly above its fellows. The frame was surmounted by the ornament of a dainty coronet; upon the features an amiable smile was recorded. “My wife,” said Lord Benthorpe simply. Then, after a long pause, “by Marsten ...”; finally in a deeper and more subdued voice ... “from a photograph.” The two men parted, and Mr Burden dressed in profound thought, wondering to have seen so much greatness united with such native ease.