Gavin was not particularly interested in the fact; but the butler in question had no intention of being ignored. A fat and pompous man of flat and florid visage, he stood, in majestic pose, at the head of the short flight of stone stairs leading to the boudoir, and his attitude no archbishop could have bettered. "Mr. Gavin Ord, is it not?" he asked. Gavin said that it was so. "We kept dinner back ten minutes, sir--I trust there has not been an accident." "No accident at all--go and tell the Earl that I am here." Mr. Griggs looked as though he had been shot. "James will do that," he retorted loftily--waving his hand as a conductor waves a baton. The obsequious footman strolled off to do the majestic man's bidding and Gavin meanwhile found himself in the banqueting hall, an old Tudor apartment he had admired in many pictures but now entered for the first time. The banners of three centuries hung in tatters from its oaken ceiling; the musicians' gallery stood as it was when fiddle and harp made music there for the seventh Henry, but Gavin resented the fashion of electric lamps none the less and instantly resolved to change them--in which intention the fat butler interrupted him with the news that the Earl awaited Mr. Ord in the long gallery. "Her ladyship is there too, sir. Perhaps you will be taking supper afterwards." "Nothing to-night," replied Ord quickly; "I shall dream enough in the old house without that." "And I dare say you will, sir. Many's the night I've seen a something, though I couldn't rightly say what it were." Gavin judged that it might have been a flask of spirits which thus troubled the good man's dreams; but he made no comment as they mounted a broad staircase, and passing through a dainty little room in one of the turrets of the house, entered the superb long gallery which is the very masterpiece of Melbourne Hall. The vast length of this, its glorious ceiling, the carvings in geometric tracery, the embrasured windows, the bays, the ingles--how familiar they seemed to Gavin, and yet how far from the truth of them had the drawings been! Just as a man may enter joyously the house of his dream as a very home of love and welcome, so did Gavin pass into the gallery and feast his eyes upon its treasures. Here, he said, a life's work might be done, indeed; here the ripest genius might fall and be gathered by the lap of time.