Hugh let his long, high-shouldered figure lapse into the window-seat. "And besides, we're all dying to know what she looks like," he suggested. "Speak for yourself, please," said Miss Fowler, with the vivacity of the lady who protests too much. "I do, I do! Good Lord! I'm just as bad as the rest of you. All my life I've been consumed to know what Uncle Hugh could have seen in a perfectly obscure little person to make him do what he did. There must have been something." His eyes travelled to a sketch in pencil of a man's head which hung in the shadow of the chimneypiece, a sketch whose uncanny suggestion might have come from the quality of the sitter or merely from a smudging of the medium. "Everything he did always seemed to me perfectly natural," he went on, as though conscious of new discovery. "Even those years when he was knocking about the world, hiding his address. Even when he had that fancy that people were persecuting him. Most people did worry him horribly." A glance flashed between the two middle-aged listeners. It was a peculiar glance, full of a half-denied portent. Then Miss Fowler's fingers, true to their traditions, loosened their grip on her needles and casually smoothed out her work. "I have asked you not to speak of that," she mentioned, quietly. "I know. But of course there was no doubt at all that he was sa--was entirely recovered before his death. Don't you think so, sir?" His uncle laid down the paper and fixed the young man with the gray, unsheathed keenness that had sent so many witnesses grovelling to the naked truth. "No doubt whatever. I always held, and so did both the physicians, that his lack of balance was a temporary and sporadic thing, brought on by overwork--and certain unhappy conditions of his life. There has never been any such taint in our branch of the family." "No-o, so they say," Hugh agreed. "One of our forebears did see ghosts, but that was rather the fashion. And his father, that old Johnnie over the fireplace--you take after him, Aunt Maria--he was the prize witch-smeller of his generation, and he condemned all the young and pretty ones. That hardly seems well-balanced." "Collaterals on the distaff side," Mr. Fowler put in hastily. "If you would read Mendel--" "Mendel? I have read about him." He raised the forefinger of his right hand. "Very suggestive. If your father was a black rabbit"--he raised the forefinger of his left--"and your mother was a white rabbit, then your male children would be"--he raised all the other fingers and paused as though taken aback by the size of the family--"would be blue guinea-pigs, with a tendency to club-foot and astigmatism, but your female children might only be rather clumsy tangoists with a weakness for cutting their poor relations. That's all I remember, but I _do_ know that because I studied the charts." "Very amusing," said Mr. Fowler, indulgently. Hugh flushed.