If that first legend smacks of midnight and hellebore, the second is to my mind a very dirge of rose petals. It relates how a sensitive little fellow of the race once lost his mother’s wedding-ring, and died of grief to witness her distress. Thereafter, then, his little ghost came haunting a particular bed in the garden--a flower-face caught fitfully among the leaves, or dropping, when one bent to pluck it, in a shower of creamy petals, like a white peony’s. So that the mother, weeping and pitiful, was moved at last to sow love-in-a-mist in the bed, as it were a net to catch that forlorn small ghost for its kissing and reassurance, and for the speaking to it in flower language of how mother did not mind her loss a bit. When lo! upon a shoot of the plant that sprung the following April was found, lifted from the soil wherein it had been lost, the ring, and the flower spectre haunted its pretty parterre no more. The fantastic superstition accorded well, I think, with the traditions of a house which had been notable as much for its rich maternity as for its fruits of over-kindness; and the “Baby’s garden”--as the mossy little pleasance, sacred to the long-vanished phantom, was called--spoke and speaks to me always of qualities better than wisdom. Wise, excepting in the one instance of my stepfather the judge, the Skenes were not; but they never were lacking, I aver, in the essential poetry of humanity. It neutralised in them, even, the vulgarity of quite commonplace exteriors. Time alone has the face which is an index to its nature. The best of men’s is but a mask. Round, florid, beaming, my stepfather’s was the face of a vintner. He might have drawn his pedigree from a beer engine, and advertised it, foaming froth, on a sign. None might have guessed from its features its age-long inheritance of gentle breeding. He was a small man, dapper and a trifle horsey in his dress, but after an older fashion of collar and harness. He wore, typically, a shepherd’s-plaid tie, and his hat at an imperceptible angle. He always smelt fresh, and, somehow, of a genial shrewdness; and his manner towards me was a manner of kindly condescension. It was not until my school time was well over, and my days drifted into the purposelessness of an unattached loafer, that I became first conscious of an alteration in his attitude towards me. And the occasion which produced it was productive of a yet colder alienation from me on the part of Lady Skene, which was as significant of her nature as was his increased consideration for me of his. One morning his lordship called me into his study. I stood before him, as I had often done before, vaguely on my guard between submission and independence, and he smiled on me, a little nervous and excited. “How old are you, Gaskett--let’s see?” he said. I answered: “I have come of age, sir.” “Any plans for your future?” “None.” “Nothing thought of--no direction?” “What could give them a direction here, sir?”