"It's a _hors d'oeuvre_ before the story," interposed Ian Stewart, throwing back his tall dark head and looking up at the picture through his eye-glasses, his handsome face alive with interest. "'Tak' awa' the kickshaws,' Fletcher, 'and bring us the cauf.'" The Professor gathered his full beard in one hand and smiled deprecatingly. "I don't know how the ladies will like my ex-great-grandmother's story. It was a bit of a scandal at the time." "Never mind, Mr. Fletcher," cried a young married woman, with a face like a seraph, "we're all educated now, and scandal about a lady with her waist under her arms becomes simply classical." "Not so bad as that, Mrs. Shaw, I assure you," returned the Professor; "but I dare say you all know as much as I do about my great-grandmother, for she was the well-known Lady Hammerton." There were sounds of interest and surprise, for most of the party knew her name, and were curious to learn how she came to be Professor Fletcher's great-grandmother. Mr. Fletcher explained: "My great-grandfather was a distinguished professor in Edinburgh a hundred years ago. When he was a widower of forty with a family, he was silly enough to fall in love with a little miss of sixteen. He taught her Latin and Greek--which was all very well--and married her, which was distinctly unwise. She had one son--my grandfather--and then ran away with an actor from London. After that she made a certain sensation on the stage, but I suspect she was clever enough to see that her real successes were personal ones; at all events, she made a good marriage as soon as ever she got the chance. The Hammerton family naturally objected. You'll find all about it in those papers which have come out lately. I believe, ladies, they were almost as much scandalized by her learning as by her morals." "She told Sydney Smith years after, I think," observed Stewart, "that she had to be a wit lest people should find out she was a blue. There's a good deal about her in the Englefield _Memoirs_. She travelled extraordinarily for a woman in those days, and most of the real treasures at Hammerton House come from her collections." "I thought they were nearly all burned in a great fire, and she was burned trying to save them," said Mrs. Shaw. "A good many were saved," returned Fletcher; "she had rushed back to fetch a favorite bronze, was seen hurling it out of the window--and was never seen again." "She must have been a very remarkable woman," commented Stewart, meditatively, his eyes still fixed on the picture. "Know nothing about her myself," remarked Sanderson; "Stewart knows something about everybody. It's sickening the way he spends his time reading gossip and calling it history."