It occurred to me after lunch that, instead of sitting over the fire with a novel I would go to the National Portrait Gallery. Sir Walter Scott says that portraits of our ancestors enable us "to compare their persons and countenances with their sentiments and actions," and I wanted to see if the Earl of Leicester's countenance fitted the story of his relations with Elizabeth, whether Nell Gwynne was as attractive as I had been told, if Pepys resembled the bust on his tomb, also to renew acquaintance with dear old Sir Thomas More and some other of those "ancestors" whose haunts I had lately been exploring. Mrs. Darling excused herself. No power on earth will on a Sunday afternoon draw her from the fireside, where she can, in comfort, study humanity through the pages of "The News of the World". A visit to the National Portrait Gallery isn't exactly a restful experience. Those long rows of faces, each making its appeal for understanding, have an exhausting effect after a time. They promise so much to Paul Pry, then baffle him with their underlying secretiveness. Sunday afternoon is not the best time to go. Early on a week-day morning is better, when the gallery is almost deserted, and in the silence you can hear the traffic in the street outside, and the echoes of an attendant's voice in some far room where he gossips to a companion. The rows upon rows of faces staring patiently from its walls give a curiously crowded sense to its emptiness, and one pictures them at closing time when the last visitor has gone, and the attendant has switched off the lights. I think I should give the Duke of Monmouth, painted after his execution, a wide berth _then_. There are others, too, who would not be cheerful companions--some of those waxen mediæval countenances would glimmer unpleasantly in the dusk, and one would be conscious of a stirring amongst the gathering of kings and queens, poets and statesmen, courtesans and cardinals, at the approach of night. I found Leicester, next to Elizabeth--a haughty-looking gentleman in his high collar and ruff. I don't like his eyes. They aren't trustworthy--but perhaps that is because I _know_. Anyhow, he has an air which would win favour with women, and he played a big part in the life of his queen from her girlhood's days until his death. There have been sinister stories told about Leicester. Ben Jonson said the Earl gave his wife "a bottle of liquor which he willed her to use in any faintness, which she, not knowing it was poison, gave him, and so he died". According to the gossip of the times, the Queen's favourite seems to have been accounted a veritable Bluebeard. Well, the secrets of his life were buried with him three hundred years ago and more, and no matter how deep we dig, we shall never discover them.