There were but wild fables spoken about this unknown girl and the secluded life her father compelled her to live at the Manor House. Some said she was the daughter of a Roumanian gypsy whom the Earl had married after his disgrace at Bukharest. Others declared that her dead mother had been an actress who had enjoyed a brief spell of notoriety in Vienna and thence had been driven out by the infatuation of an archduke. None knew the truth, but there were many to suggest what the truth might be. Openly and scandalously, as the world will, idle tongues hinted that the Earl must have some good reason for his eccentric conduct. There were even stories that the Lady Evelyn was unmistakably a gypsy girl herself. "As brown as a walnut chiffonier," said little Backbiter at the Club. The fellow had never been within fifty miles of Melbourne Hall; and if he had met the Earl, he would have gone down on his marrow bones to him. Gavin Ord recalled some of these stories as he followed the tortuous road and left the solitary village still farther behind him. They did not interest him. He had gone into Derbyshire to see not a woman but a house. Delight that he should be chosen for guardian of such a national treasure as Melbourne Hall went with him upon his way. He must be now, he thought, but a mile from the Manor gates. The road had become narrow and closely bordered by leafy elms. No longer could he see the moonlit heights or the twinkling lights in the valleys. There were no kindly beams to guide his steps. In weird darkness he followed the dusty track and pressed on toward the Manor. The rustling of leaves sounded almost like a human voice in his ears. He liked to think that Nature was still awake and speaking to him. So it is evident that he possessed that quasi-divine attribute, imagination. His mood of thought responded instantly to any change, atmospheric, or of the light of the heavens. The sunshine could ever build temples of success for him; the twilight rarely failed to bring the question, what is the good of it all, of ambition and the stress and strife of arenas. In the night he would awake to remember that all men must die. In the daytime he would laugh at death and all the vain problems of the hereafter. That Melbourne Hall, approached in this gloom of a summer's night, should provoke no evil thoughts but only those of good omen, seemed a new witness to the pleasure with which he contemplated his stay there. He would accomplish something amid those ancient stones by which men should remember him. The aspiration quickened his step. A turn of the road revealed the lodge-gates, with a lighted window and a pleasant cottage. He entered Lord Melbourne's park and discerned the Hall, dim and stately and starred with lights, across the little river which stood for a moat before its walls.