"Well, you see"--the Collector smiled--"I was never called upon. But it's in the blood. Has Miss Quiney ever told you about Oliver Cromwell?" "Yes. He cut off King Charles's head. . . . I don't think Miss Quiney liked him for that, though she didn't say so." The Collector was still smiling. "He certainly helped to cut off King Charles's head, and--right or wrong--it's remembered against him. But he did any amount of great things too. He was a masterful man; and perhaps the reason why Miss Quiney held her tongue is that he happens to be an ancestor of ours, and she knew it." "Oliver Cromwell?" Dicky repeated the name slowly, with awe. "He was my great-great-grandfather, and you can add on another 'great' for yourself. I am called Oliver after him. They even say," added Captain Vyell, sipping his wine, "that I have some of his features; and so, perhaps, will you when you grow up. But of your chance of that you shall judge before long. I am having a copy of his portrait sent over from England." For a moment or two these last remarks scarcely penetrated to the boy's hearing. Like all boys, he naturally desired greatness; unlike most, he was conscious of standing above the crowd, but without a guess that he derived the advantage from anything better than accident. His father had the good fortune to be rich. For himself--well, Dicky was born with one of those simple natures that incline rather to distrust than to overrate their own merits. None the less he desired and loved greatness--thus early, and throughout his life--and it came as a tremendous, a magnificent shock to him that he enjoyed it as a birthright. The repetition of "great"--"he was my great-great-grandfather;" "you can add another 'great' for yourself"-- hummed in his ears. A full half a minute ticked by before he grasped at the remainder of his father's speech, and, like a breaking twig, it dropped him to bathos. "But--but--" Dicky passed a hand over his face--"Miss Quiney said that Oliver Cromwell was covered with warts!" Captain Vyell laughed outright. "Women have wonderful ways of conveying a prejudice. Warts? Well, there, at any rate, we have the advantage of old Noll." The Collector, whose sense of hearing was acute and fastidious, broke off with a sharp arching of the eyebrows and a glance up at the ceiling, or rather (since ceiling there was none) at the oaken beams which supported the floor overhead. "Manasseh," he said quickly, "be good enough to step upstairs and inform our landlady that the pitch of her voice annoys me. She would seem to be rating a servant girl above." "Yes, sah." "Pray desire her to take the girl away and scold her elsewhere." Manasseh disappeared, and returned two minutes later to report that "the woman would give no furdah trouble." He removed the white cloth, set out the decanters with an apology for the mahogany's indifferent polish, and withdrew again to prepare his master's coffee.