Two or three of the smaller rooms, such as the breakfast-room, the dining-room, and his dead mother's boudoir, were alone furnished in modern style. In all the others there seemed to linger an atmosphere of bygone centuries. This was the fine old home which so many mothers coveted for their daughters. Indeed, there were a hundred pretty and well-born girls in London, each of whom was at that moment ready to become chatelaine of Wroxeter. But Dudley strolled on slowly, almost like a man in a dream. He was seldom at Wroxeter out of the shooting season. The place was to him something of a white elephant. He had spent his boyhood there, but recollections of the rather unhappy life and early death of that grave-faced woman, his mother, caused him to dislike the old place. One or two memories he would fain forget--memories of his mother's sorrow regarding her husband's mode of life and eccentricities. Truth to tell, husband and wife did not live happily together, and Dudley, knowing this, had been his mother's sympathiser and champion. These handsome rooms, with their ancient tapestries, wonderful carpets, exquisite carvings, old Venetian mirrors and time-darkened gilt, even in the gay light of morning seemed to him sombre and full of ghosts of the past. He only used the library and half a dozen of the smaller and more modern rooms in the eastern wing. The splendid state apartments which he had just passed through he seldom visited. No one entered them, except the servants to clean and open the windows, and the upholsterer who at fixed intervals came from Shrewsbury to examine the tapestries worked centuries ago by the fair hands of the Chisholm women. From the great drawing-room, a huge apartment with a rather low ceiling curiously carved, he passed on, and traversing one of the ante rooms, found himself in the long corridor which ran the whole length of the quadrangle. The stone flooring was worn hollow in the centre by the tramp of generations of armed men, and the quaint arched doors were heavy and studded with monstrous nails. He stood there for a few minutes, glancing through the diamond panes out into the ancient courtyard. His abstracted mood was suddenly disturbed by the sound of the breakfast gong. As his guests would be awaiting him, he must throw care to the dogs for a few hours and try to amuse them. Turning, he walked down the long corridor. As he did so he recollected the strange tradition which he had heard in his youth--namely, that in this passage had been seen at certain intervals a strange old lady, humpbacked and small, dressed in rusty black, who "walked" the corridor even in the middle of the day, and then suddenly disappeared through a door which for a full century past had been walled up. This legendary apparition was known to the family as Lady Margaret, and whenever she showed herself in the corridor it was a presage of evil to the Chisholms.