‘You have relations or friends in America, perhaps, Miss Sivewright?’ inquired Lucius; but a little warning look and gesture from Lucille prevented his repeating the question. He began to tell her some of his adventures beyond the Red River—not his hours of dire strait and calamity, not the horror of his forest experiences. Those were things he never spoke of, scenes he dared not think of, days which it was misery to him to remember. ‘You must have gone through great hardship,’ she said, after listening to him with keen interest. ‘Were you never in actual peril?’ ‘Once. We were lost in a forest westward of the Rocky Mountains. But that is a period I do not care to speak of. My dearest friend was ill—at the point of death. Happily for us a company of Canadian emigrants, bound for the gold-fields, came across our track just in time to save us. But for that providential circumstance I shouldn’t be here to tell you the story. Wolves or wolverines would have picked my bones.’ ‘Horrible!’ exclaimed Lucille, with a shudder. ‘Yes. Wolves are not agreeable society. But human nature is still more horrible when it casts off the mask of civilisation.’ Mr. Sivewright had finished his dinner by this time, and had absorbed two glasses of the sound Medoc without a single contortion of his visage; a striking instance of the force of habit. ‘Come,’ said he. ‘I’ll show you some of my collection. You’re no judge of art, I suppose. I never knew a young man who was; though they’re always ready enough with their opinions.’ He took up one of the candles, and led the way to the hall, thence to a room on the other side of the house, larger than the family sitting-room, and used as a storehouse for his treasures. Here Lucius beheld the same confusion of bric-à-brac which had bewildered him on his first entrance into that singular mansion, only on a larger scale. Pictures again, statues again, cabinets, tables, fragmentary pieces of mediæval oak carving, stray panels that had once lined old Flemish churches, choir-stalls with sacred story carved upon their arms and backs; armour again, grim and ghastly as the collection of the Hôtel Cluny, demonstrating how man’s invention, before it entered the vast field of gunnery, had lavished its wanton cruelty on forms that hack and hew, and jag and tear and saw; spiky swords, pole-axes with serrated edges, pikes from which dangled iron balls studded with sharp points; and so on. Ceramic ware, again, of every age, from a drinking-vessel dug from beneath one of the earth-mounds on the shores of the Euphrates to the chocolatière out of which Marie Jeanne Vaubernier, otherwise Du Barri, took her last breakfast. And, rising grim above the frivolities of art, loomed the gaunt outline of a Scottish Maiden, the rough germ of the Gallic guillotine.