My lady sat upright in the tapestried saloon, marvelling that no one filled the teapot. It was with a distressed amazement, like that of Louis XIV. when he waited, that she stared at the silver equipage, at the pathetically hissing urn. Where was Doreen the tea-maker? It was quite dark, and the incorrigible damsel was still galloping about the country, who might tell whither? It really was shocking; no wonder if milady's quills of propriety stood out, after the manner of the fretful one. It's that drop of Papist blood, she muttered; then turned to admonish her brother as to his heiress. But Arthur Wolfe listened without a word, for he was accustomed to his sister's querulous complaining, and built a bulwark of silence against her jeremiads. People said all his time was spent in negative apologies for the one error of his youth; and it did look like it; for he was marvellously patient in the face of her most tyrannical whims, listening without a struggle to endless sermons which prated of the woe to come, reflecting that, poor soul, she had much to put up with. Although she was reticent and mysterious to an extreme degree, Arthur Wolfe knew that her lines were not cast in pleasant places; for did not flaunting Gillen abide at the very gates, whose odious vicinity caused her to shrink as much as might be from passing beyond her own domains? Time and this bitter pill had made of her ladyship a 'swaddler.' Like many of the oldsters of the patrician order, she grew sorely repentant for youthful peccadilloes, took to psalm-singing, displayed strong ultra-Protestant proclivities. The prejudices of a less enlightened age curtained her brain with cobwebs which excluded the daylight from the vermin they engendered. On this 12th of July she set aside, according to custom, the pearly grey which becomes her age so well, to don weird orange vestments which make her look like a macaw--she who is usually dressed in such perfect taste in a robe of silvered satin, with snowy hair in rolls unpowdered. Although she is but fifty-two, my lady is a white-haired queen Bess; and handsome in an imposing way, which she never was in youth. The thin nose looks higher than it used to be, and pinched. The cheek is pale and marked with anxious wrinkles; but the straight line of imperious brow remains the same, and the eyes--netted with crowsfeet--assume a more vigorous life by reason of the fading of their surroundings. The Countess of Glandore has in twelve years become an awful dowager, before whom the cottagers shake in their shoes; for to a misleading appearance of patriarchal majesty she adds a quick incisive way of speech, and the bodily activity of a middle-aged woman who enjoys a perfect constitution. Those startled eyes tell tales, though, of a diseased mind, and sleepless nights of tossing. And she does pass sleepless nights, despite the Consoler's fanning, when the secret chord is struck. Then as she lies on her laced pillows she sees once more the sheeted body