Whether Dolly was agreeable or not, this was what George was pretty sure to do. CHAPTER II. DUTCH TILES. O priceless art! O princely state, E'en while by sense of change opprest, Within to antedate Heaven's age of fearless rest. --J. H. Newman. There are many disconnected pictures in Dorothea Vanborough's gallery, drifting and following each other like the images of a dissolving-view. There are voices and faces changing, people whom she hardly knows to be the same appearing and disappearing. Looking back now-a-days through a score or two of years, Dorothea can see many lights crossing and reflecting one another, many strange places and persons in juxtaposition. She can hear, as we all can, a great clamour of words and of laughter, cries of pain and of sorrow and anger, through all of which sound the sacred voices that will utter to her through life--and beyond life she humbly prays. Dorothea's pictures are but mist and fancy work, not made of paint and canvas as is that one which hangs over the fire-place in the wainscot dining-room at Church House in Kensington, where my heroine passed so much of her life. It is supposed by some to be a Van der Helst. It represents a golden brown grandmother, with a coiffe and a ruffle and a grand chain round her neck, and a ring on her forefinger, and a double-winged house in the background. This placid-faced Dutchwoman, existing two centuries ago, has some looks still living in the face of the Dorothea Vanborough of these days. Her descendants have changed their name and their dress, cast away their ruffles, forgotten the story of their early origin; but there is still a something that tells of it: in Dolly's slow quaint grace and crumpled bronze hair, in her brother George's black brows, in their aunt Lady Sarah Francis's round brown eyes and big ears, to say nothing of her store of blue Dutch china. Tall blue pots, with dragon handles, are ranged in rows upon the chimney-board under the picture. On either side of the flame below are blue tiles, that Lady Sarah's husband brought over from the Hague the year before he died. Abraham, Jonah, Noah, Balaam tumbling off his blue ass; the whole sacred history is there, lighted up by the flaring flame of the logs. When first George and Dolly came to live in the old house, then it was the pictures came to life. The ass began to call out Balaam! Balaam! The animals to walk two by two (all blue) into the ark. Jonah's whale swallowed and disgorged him night after night, as George and Dolly sat at their aunt's knee listening to her stories in the dusk of the 'children's hour;' and the vivid life that childhood strikes even into inanimate things, awakened the widow's dull heart and the silent house in the old by-lane in Kensington.