In the building everything, including the structure itself, seemed hastening to decay. The walls, the floor, the furniture, the servants, the master, all were old. She formed the one exception to the general appearance of approaching dissolution. The outer walls of the pile were seamed and lined, the water had eaten into the stone, the frost had cracked the mortar, and unsightly yellow stains lay upon the masonry, like long skeleton fingers pointing to the earth into which the walls were hastening. When castles were places of defence as well as of residence, Island Castle was well known. It had stood two sieges, and had been a famous place of meeting among the Jacobites. Its insular position, the wide prospect it commanded, the fact that it could not be invested on all sides at once except by a whole army, the facilities it afforded to approach and flight of friends, and the difficulty, amounting almost to an impossibility, of reaching it by surprise except under the favour of night or a fog, all added together made it a place of great importance once upon a time. The Castle had not always been in the Midharst family. It had come to them early in the eighteenth century, upon the failure in heirs male of the great Fleurey family, by which failure the historic earldom of Stancroft was lost to the blood for ever. The Midharsts had some of the female Fleurey blood in their veins, but it was of distant origin; and title to the fine castle and property was declared to Sir John Midharst, the first of his name who laid claim to it, only after long and expensive litigation and much scandal. Up to that time the Midharsts had been poor baronets. The property accompanying the Island in the year 1866 brought in a rental of more than twenty-two thousand pounds a year. It was a very singular fact that from the first baronet who sat as master in Warfinger Island Castle down to old Sir Alexander, no son succeeded a father. It was always a grandson or a nephew, or a grand-nephew or some remote cousin. Now matters were worse than ever. Sir Alexander was upwards of seventy years of age, with an only child, a daughter, and the closest male was a direct descendant of the youngest son of the baronet, the lucky Sir John who came in for the property that had supported the extinct earldom of Stancroft. No doubt this remote cousin was a Midharst in name and blood, but somehow it was hard for Sir Alexander to feel very cordial or friendly towards one so remote from him, one who was going to take the property and the title away from his immediate family. At the time Lady Midharst died Sir Alexander was but a little over fifty years of age, and many thought he would marry again. But even then he was ailing, and doctors told him that between asthma and valvular derangement of the heart his chance of living even a few years was slight. Of course, they said, he might live fifty years, but he was heavily handicapped.