"How strange! Do you also remember the lady's name?" "Perfectly. All London went mad over her. She called herself Etta Romney, and the play showed just such a house as this. It was the old story of Di Vernon retold, Lady Evelyn." "You were much taken with the play, it appears?" "Not with the play at all. But I thought Etta Romney one of the cleverest women I have ever seen on the stage." "Is she playing still, may I ask?" "You know that she is not, Lady Evelyn." "I know it--are you serious?" "So serious that I shall forget the subject until you choose to speak of it again." "But it interests me greatly," she pleaded, with that insistence which often attends the discussion of things better avoided. "If I am really so like somebody else, ought I not to be curious? You say----" "Indeed, I say nothing," he exclaimed quickly, and then in a lower voice--"at least until the Earl has breakfasted." She did not reply. The Earl entered the room and began at once to speak of Gavin's work and the arrangements which must be made for it. CHAPTER XIX FROM THE BELFRY TOWER Gavin's little band of workmen ran up a light scaffold of ladders and boards for him against the belfry tower, and had it finished upon the morning of the conversation with the Lady Evelyn. To this height he climbed early in the day, when began an examination of the decaying fabric and set down the first lines of the report he had to make to the Earl. The old building was in a shocking state certainly; the plumb-line declared surprising departures from that stately grace of perpendicularity the text-books had taught him to esteem. Gavin should have taken the greatest interest in all this, but he did not. Had you spoken to him yesterday, he would have been ready to declare that nothing on earth could be more fascinating than the very task he now pretended to be engaged upon; but his habitual candor came to his rescue to-day and he now pronounced the work to be almost distasteful. For, in truth, he had discovered a secret as old as man, and the delight of that new knowledge surpassed the worker's dreams by far. He stood upon a dizzy height, but custom had staled the peril of his employment, and, in this aspect, fear was unknown to him. A high trembling ladder permitted him to climb up to a couple of boards suspended from the parapet above by frail ropes cunningly wound about the embrasures of the battlements. He stood with his back to a mossy wall; beneath him lay the fair domain of Melbourne Hall; its ancient trees so many children's fretted toys; its grass lands supremely green; pool and lake and river ablaze with the golden light of an Autumn sun. But more to Gavin than these was the figure of the Lady Evelyn herself, clearly to be seen in the glade where the gypsies had pitched their camp--the figure of an English girl divinely tall, of one whom the splendid woods might well choose for their divinity.