THE house of Mr. Travers contained a considerable collection of family portraits, few of them well painted, but the Squire was evidently proud of such evidences of ancestry. They not only occupied a considerable space on the walls of the reception rooms, but swarmed into the principal sleeping-chambers, and smiled or frowned on the beholder from dark passages and remote lobbies. One morning, Cecilia, on her way to the china closet, found Kenelm gazing very intently upon a female portrait consigned to one of those obscure receptacles by which through a back staircase he gained the only approach from the hall to his chamber. “I don’t pretend to be a good judge of paintings,” said Kenelm, as Cecilia paused beside him; “but it strikes me that this picture is very much better than most of those to which places of honour are assigned in your collection. And the face itself is so lovely that it would add an embellishment to the princeliest galleries.” “Yes,” said Cecilia, with a half-sigh. “The face is lovely, and the portrait is considered one of Lely’s rarest masterpieces. It used to hang over the chimney-piece in the drawing-room. My father had it placed here many years ago.” “Perhaps because he discovered it was not a family portrait?” “On the contrary,--because it grieves him to think it is a family portrait. Hush! I hear his footstep: don’t speak of it to him; don’t let him see you looking at it. The subject is very painful to him.” Here Cecilia vanished into the china closet and Kenelm turned off to his own room. What sin committed by the original in the time of Charles II. but only discovered in the reign of Victoria could have justified Leopold Travers in removing the most pleasing portrait in the house from the honoured place it had occupied, and banishing it to so obscure a recess? Kenelm said no more on the subject, and indeed an hour afterwards had dismissed it from his thoughts. The next day he rode out with Travers and Cecilia. Their way passed through quiet shady lanes without any purposed direction, when suddenly, at the spot where three of those lanes met on an angle of common ground, a lonely gray tower, in the midst of a wide space of grass-land which looked as if it had once been a park, with huge boles of pollarded oak dotting the space here and there, rose before them.