The old lady and the young man sat opposite each other before a glowing wood fire in the great drawing–room. Mrs. Luttrell was a small, high–bred, handsome woman, with snow–white hair, perfect teeth, a charming smile, a reckless tongue, and a fixed determination to have her own way twenty–four hours out of the day and three hundred and sixty–five days in the year, with an additional day thrown in at leap–year. Time had left a few external marks upon her, but in essentials she was the same woman General Brandon had danced with forty–five years before. She was in love with the same man, who even then was in his early grave,—Richard Luttrell, the husband of her youth. He had been dead unnumbered years, and only one person on earth—his nephew, Richard Baskerville—suspected that Mrs. Luttrell cherished her husband’s memory with a smouldering and silent passion,—the only thing she was ever known to be silent about in her life. Mrs. Luttrell sat bolt upright, after the ancient fashion, in her carved ebony chair, while Richard Baskerville lounged at his ease on the other side of the marble mantel. He was a well–made man of thirty–five, without any particular merit in the way of beauty; but so clear of eye, so clean cut of feature, so expressive of a man’s intelligence and a man’s courage, that people forgot to ask whether he was handsome or not. Mrs. Luttrell always maintained that he was very handsome, but found few to agree with her. Her belief came, however, from his resemblance to the miniature of her husband which she kept in her capacious pocket—for she still insisted on pockets in her gowns, and this miniature never left her by day or night. Mrs. Luttrell’s drawing–room was the admiration and the despair of people who knew something about drawing–rooms. It might have been taken bodily from the Second French Embassy, of which Mrs. Luttrell had seen a good deal, for she had known the third Napoleon well at some indefinite period in her history. The room was large and square and high–pitched, and wholly innocent of bay–windows, cosey corners, and such architectural fallals. The ceiling was heavily ornamented with plaster in the Italian style, and the cornice was superb. Over the fireplace was a great white marble mantel with a huge mirror above it, and in one corner of the room a grand piano something under a hundred years old looked like a belle in hoopskirts. There was a wealth of old rosewood furniture, pictures, candelabra, girandoles, Dresden ornaments, and other beautiful old things which would have made a collector turn green with envy.