But he accepted these inevitable consequences and he went to Faldon, and saw them packed with his own eyes, and with his own hands placed in its wooden case with tender care a little flaxen-haired maiden spinning, of Mieris, which when he had been a child he had always called the portrait of his wife. It was a cruel sacrifice to an unworthy object when the pictures went from their places, and the red sunset light coming over the Atlantic billows shone on the blank walls from which they had been torn. Truly have the Rosny spoken of the _semi-humanité des choses_! the sympathetic companionship which we feel in those cherished things of our homes, wound as they are about the roots of our fondest memories, of our longest associations. Two days later Katherine Massarene received a check on Coutts’s, signed Hurstmanceaux, for the amount which her father had paid the jeweler _plus_ the interest at five per cent. for two years. It was enclosed with the compliments of the sender. A week later she saw in an art journal the announcement of the sale, to the Paris dealers, of the Dutch and Flemish collection of Faldon Castle. It seemed to her as if her father’s spirit rose from the tomb in malignant power for evil. She put the check in one of the iron safes in the little study and turned the key on it. He might send her the money in what way he would. He could not make her take it. But she had forgotten that this stubbornness might equal, and even exceed her own. CHAPTER XXXIV. In the month of August Lord Roxhall, who was at Arcachon with his wife, ostensibly for health, in reality to cut short the expenses of a season in town, received amongst his correspondence a letter in a black-edged envelope addressed in a clear firm handwriting which was unknown to him, and bearing the postmark of his own country town, that town which William Massarene’s funeral had recently passed through in such pomp and glory. The letter astonished him, and he read it twice, incredulous of its meaning and wondering vaguely if it were genuine. It was dated from Vale Royal and worded thus: “MY DEAR LORD ROXHALL,