She showed Mr. O'Boyneville her aunt's letter; and even the obscure little postscript did not escape the searching eye of the barrister. He asked who the Hector Gordon was who was expected home; and Cecil had to explain her aunt's relationship to the Plunger captain, and to tell the story of the young man's marriage and widowhood, for her husband's edification. CHAPTER XX. AT PEVENSHALL PLACE. Pevenshall Place was a noble modern mansion, which Thomas Lobyer the elder had built for himself in the days when he still hoped to find a worthy successor to his commercial glory in the person of the lad who was spending his juvenile leisure among lords and commoners on the grassy meads of Eton. The great millowner's wealth had been lavished freely on the solid grandeur and decorative splendours of Pevenshall. The house was in the Italian style,--a noble square white mansion, with a balustraded roof, surmounted by airy turrets, and a broad terrace-walk, that commanded one of the loveliest prospects in Yorkshire. No vulgar architect had designed the Manchester trader's dwelling. The millionaire of to-day begins life with gigantic advantages. He has the benefit of two thousand years of civilisation, and may profit by the experience of emperors. Before the plans for Pevenshall were completed and approved, Mr. Lobyer had been made familiar with all the masterpieces of domestic architecture still existing in the present, or known to have existed in the past. He had disdained Stowe, and had rejected Fonthill; he had pooh-poohed Adrian's Villa, and turned up his nose at the abode of Lucullus. He had remarked that the apartments of Sallust, at Pompeii, might be eminently adapted for a gentleman's wine-cellars, but were utterly unfit for a gentleman's residence. After going through innumerable folios of drawings and engravings which his architect--happy in the expectation of five per cent. on some fifty thousand pounds--had brought to him, Mr. Lobyer made his choice with that promptitude and decision which had regulated his conduct in all the most important affairs of life. "If I can't have that," he said, laying the end of his square forefinger on an engraving of Warwick Castle,--"and of course I can't, for I never saw any thing in the way of a castle built nowadays that didn't look like a workhouse or a gaol--I'll have that;" and he transferred his finger to a water-colour sketch of a modern Italian villa in the suburbs of Florence; "or at any rate I'll have that kind of place--light, and bright, and cheerful-looking outside; but as warm and comfortable inside as an old-fashioned farmhouse, and from garret to collar as solid as the Tower of London. Give me a drawing-room forty feet by twenty five, an entrance-hall thirty feet square; and take care there's no such thing as a dark corner or a narrow passage in the house, and I shall be satisfied."