So much I heard before the pair rode away out of hearing--a blot on the sunny day. It was seldom that Sir Rupert was seen in our part of the world, or indeed anywhere outside his own Castle of Angry, where they say that he and Gaskin drink together, and the peasants suppose that the devil himself often makes a third. Somehow I guessed that he had come, casting his shadow on Brandon, that he might see the place he is bent on making his own. Alas! Sir Rupert is our one probable purchaser for our dear old home. Who else would want it?--all gone to ruin as it is, and stripped of all but its beauty. How often we have declared hotly that we would die ere he should have it, every one of us, from Aline to the youngest twin. But there he sits like a great gray old spider in his web, waiting and waiting till we are obliged to walk into it and he gobbles us and our poor Brandon up; and also the poor innocent people as well, in their wretched neglected mountain farms, who exist simply by reason of our forbearance. Yet Oona, our nurse, remembers when Sir Rupert was a dashing young gentleman,--no one ever suspected that he would grow into an ogre. "He had the bad drop, though," Oona will say, wagging her old head. "He was personable, but never to my liking. Your grandmama, Miss Hilda, could never abide him, and wouldn't have married him not if your grand-papa had never been born. She guessed at the bad drop in him, dear young lady, though her ears had been kept from hearing what other people knew of him. Your grandpapa and he were like day and night, the one all goodness and brightness, the other with the black passions already marking his face." Oona has told me over and over again the story of the love of the two men for my grandmother, an episode which has ruined us Brandons, and made Sir Rupert our implacable enemy. Our grandmother's picture hangs in the boudoir, where Aline sits sewing or writing letters, or puzzling over wretched sums, poor darling! There are beautiful women nowadays, but women like our grandmother seem to have left the world altogether. She must have been very tall; the folds of her white silk dress sweep away an endless distance in the picture. She has the neck of a swan, and a face, pure oval, with large melancholy eyes. Ringlets fall on either side of her exquisite face, and so innocent is her expression that she seems rather a creature for heaven than for earth. And indeed she did not live long after our dear father was born. Grandpapa I can remember dimly, and can well believe that he was a handsome young man. Trouble had bent him, but there was no bitterness in the blue eyes--"eyes of youth", though youth had long left him. Even for Sir Rupert he had forgiveness at last, so true a Christian was he, so humbly emulous of the Master he loved and served.