But, despite the obvious influence exerted by the Castle on the individuality of Gundred, Kingston could not but be struck again and again by the contrast between his pin-neat, impeccable wife, orderly in mind, body, desires, and the many riotous scarlet lives that she summed up in her own neutral-tinted nature. Always turbulent, always passionate, impatient of rule, loving and hating without limit or bond of reason, breathing the air of battle from birth to death, and flagging in the close air of peace, the Mortimers were a strange race to end thus, in a woman to whom peace, order, reason, limit were the very conditions of her being. As she talked to him of her people, Kingston noticed the small, flickering flames of vitality that leapt up in her nature out of the dead past. Here and there in her utterance from time to time some bygone tyrant dictated an inflection, some dead Queen contributed a thought. Kingston heard these voices so distinctly, noticed so clearly the occurrence of each foreign thought that twanged abruptly in the music of Gundred’s voice, like the sudden throb of a harp across a piano’s level ripplings, that it seemed to him at last as if, at moments, she were the mere mouthpiece of ghosts. For a vanishing instant, now and then, her lips spoke what her mind had not conceived, what her heart had not sanctioned. She was possessed by a fragment of the life that had gone before. But was this all? Robbers and wantons that they were in their lawless splendour, had the Mortimers given their descendant nothing beyond these fragmentary reminiscences? Was there in her, far down under the orderly, decorous placidity of her surface, no stirring possibility of those old primitive passions, of those fierce blood-lusts or those religious frenzies, that should have come with the very fabric of her life out of the buried long-ago? The question was strangely interesting, in the bizarre contrast between the neat, methodical thing she was, and the wild daughter of the past that, by some freak of fortune, she might perhaps again become. Kingston watched her keenly, hoping that some day, sooner or later, might raise again the hidden depths of her nature, and reveal, in a tempest of passion, the frantic possibilities of the Mortimers. The idea was inconceivable, monstrous, grotesque; but attractive as a romantic paradox. As with most paradoxes, deep down in his heart he utterly disbelieved it. CHAPTER VI