“Well, what do they say about the Russian advance, over there? Did you see any of the big German guns in action?” For days after this the conversation turned on the technical questions of war, with which Vinton’s opportunities as a war correspondent had made him familiar. Then one night Vinton had come down from Boston on a late afternoon train. He had been lunching at one of the clubs with friends who had listed him to speak at two or three houses in aid of emergency funds. It was tea-time and suddenly he rose, with his cup and saucer in hand, and went over to one of the dining-room windows. “Hello,” he said. “We’re going to get a northeaster, I’ll be bound.” “The sheep-shearer’s due,” said Ware from his desk. And it was that very night, when the great easterly gale was enveloping the whole New England coast and was sending showers of sparks down the big fire-place before which they sat, in a low-ceiled room which had been the kitchen in colonial days, that Vinton told the story as he had heard it from the Marquis of Mallorie’s daughter. ―――― “It seems,” he began, “that the Mallories are of an immensely ancient family in the southwest of England; the title is one of the oldest in the realm, and one of the poorest. Away back in the time of the Tudor they became Protestant under protest, and have remained so under protest; only their chapel, like the worshipping places of the early Christians, was taken down into the bosom of the earth and there it rested, exhaling strange virtues over all the land above, and, as many thought, harboring much of good that the newer order of things had cast out. And so the Mallories are High-Church and when the Puseyites began their revolt they were only approaching what the Mallories had been for centuries. And about these delightful people there is none of the fanaticism of the convert.