She had, besides, a way of appending an interrogative ‘yes’ to every other sentence, which, by degrees, drove her husband to distraction. He found himself looking ahead for it along the conversation as one looks ahead for the next telegraph-pole on a slow journey. And as surely as the telegraph-pole that ‘yes’ would come, maddening him with the certainty of its reiteration. Brakelond, accordingly, was a relief to both husband and wife--how great a relief they neither of them knew. They could take refuge from themselves among the ghosts of the dead Mortimers. Gundred almost grew excited as she repeated the stories of her people, and the spirits of the dead seemed to fill her veins with some of the blood she apparently lacked. A stark thorny tree it was, to have borne, at the last, so mild and white a bud as she. Always in opposition, always ambitious, always unscrupulous, maniacs in persecution, in martyrdom, in love, the Mortimers had risen and fallen, tempestuously fighting, up and down the steps of the throne. Ruined with Queen Isabel, they had survived only to fall again before the House of York. With the Tudors their glory towered once more, until a characteristically ambitious attempt to marry the Queen of Scots had destroyed the March of the time. Then, after a few years of comparative quiet, they had risen conspicuous as the only great house that had sided with the country against King Charles. This unpopular piece of patriotism forced the Mortimers into discreet seclusion through Restoration days, until a new opportunity of manifesting it arrived with the Great Revolution. The House of March, always especially patriotic when patriotism involved enmity to the Crown, had had a narrow escape of ruin at the time of King Monmouth’s disaster, and, for its safety, the Prince of Orange did not land a day too soon. His coming, however, with the comparative loyalty that followed, and its resultant dukedom, had established March and Brakelond in that period of slow prosperity which had led on through two centuries of gradual inanition to its present effete or atrophied state. It seemed as if the furious old Castle and the furious old race that owned it could not live fully nor thrive without that atmosphere of violence in which they had so often gloried and agonized together. Peace--slackening, corroding, monotonous--was fatal to the vitality of the Mortimers.