“The sportsmen aren’t content with pheasants and partridges and hares as their fathers were, they go to the Alleghanies and Central Africa for big game, and the scholars, I suppose, think they’re entitled to follow suit and try farther afield for fresh ideas,” suggested Eleanor. “Anyhow, I don’t know what to make of young Lindsey. When I talked with him last he didn’t seem to know his own mind. But he’ll have to make it up one way or another before the next election. Richardson says he’s tired of playing warming-pan for him, and, of course, it’s out of the question that anyone but a Yarborough or his nominee should sit for this division. But Lindsey will be getting married before long, no doubt, and that will take the nonsense out of him. Say we’re bringing a friend, Eleanor.” Norton Towers, the ancestral home of the Yarboroughs is a large and rambling structure in various styles of architecture, built originally in the Wars of the Roses, but added to and altered many times. It stands pleasantly and picturesquely on a rising stretch of knoll, Some eight miles distant from Caistorholm The noble family, whose principal seat it is, has for many generations been of paramount consideration and influence in Lincolnshire. The founder of the family is commonly supposed to have been a Venetian adventurer, one of the many merchant princes of the Adriatic’s queen, who, settling in London, became Lord Mayor under the second Richard. Then, in time, the family withdrew from commerce, acquired by prudent purchases and equally prudent marriages considerable estates in Lincolnshire, and became in time as racy of the soil as though not a trace of Italian blood intermingled with the blue blood their alliances had incorporated. In the Civil War the heir of the house had a narrow escape of perishing on Cavendish Bog at the hand of Oliver himself, then a captain of Horse in the Parliamentary forces not yet known to fame, though marked by the observant. The Royalist soldier was borne from the field with Oliver’s bullet in his sword-arm, and that and the fever that supervened had like to have finished him, and gave him a distaste for further adventures of the kind. When the Commonwealth came the family compounded for past offences by a smart money-fine, and accepted with what grace they might the Roundhead régime. Cromwell bore no malice, perhaps remembering Cavendish Bog, and the Yarboroughs, though but sullenly acquiescent in the new order of things, and indifferent psalm-singers, kept themselves clear of the plots against the Protector’s life and rule.