If old Mr. Mottisfont had not been irritated with David Blake for being as he put it, a damn fool, he would not have made the references he had done to his nephew Edward’s wife. They touched David upon the raw, and old Mr. Mottisfont was very well aware of it. As David went out of the room and closed the door, a strange mood came upon him. All the many memories of this house, familiar to him from early boyhood, all the many memories of this town of his birth and upbringing, rose about him. It was a strange mood, but yet not a sad one, though just beyond it lay the black shadow which is the curse of the Celt. David Blake came of an old Irish stock, although he had never seen Ireland. He had the vein of poetry—the vein of sadness, which are born at a birth with Irish humour and Irish wit. As he went down the staircase, the famous staircase with its carved newels, the light of a moving lamp came up from below, and at the turn of the stair he stood aside to let Elizabeth Chantrey pass. She wore a grey dress, and the lamp-light shone upon her hair and made it look like very pale gold. It was thick hair—very fine and thick, and she wore it in a great plait like a crown. In the daytime it was not golden at all, but just the colour of the pale thick honey with which wax is mingled. Long ago a Chantrey had married a wife from Norway with Elizabeth’s hair and Elizabeth’s dark grey eyes. “Good-night, David,” said Elizabeth Chantrey. She would have passed on, but to her surprise David made no movement. He was looking at her. “This is where I first saw you, Elizabeth,” he said in a remembering voice. “You had on a grey dress, like that one, but Mary was in blue, because Mr. Mottisfont wouldn’t let her wear mourning. Do you remember how shocked poor Miss Agatha was?—‘and their mother only dead a month!’ I can hear her now.” Mary—yes, he remembered little Mary Chantrey in her blue dress. He could see her now—nine years old—in a blue dress—with dark curling hair and round brown eyes, holding tightly to Elizabeth’s skirts, and much too shy to speak to the big strange boy who was Edward’s friend.