associations of those portraits of his ancestors. Some trouble, some
sorrow, must have kept him away from it, she felt.

But she would not question Mrs. Eccles about him; she encouraged her to
talk of the dead and gone generations as much as she pleased, but of the
man who was her master Vera would have thought it scarcely honourable to
have spoken to his servant. Perhaps, too, she preferred her dreams. One
day, idly opening the drawer of an old bureau in the little room which
Mrs. Eccles always called religiously "My lady's morning room," Vera came
upon a modern photograph that arrested her attention wonderfully.

It represented, however, nothing very remarkable; only a
broad-shouldered, good-looking young man, with an aquiline noise and a
close-cropped head. On the reverse side of the card was written in
pencil, "My son--for Mrs. Eccles." Lady Kynaston, she supposed, must
therefore have sent it to the old housekeeper, and of course it was Sir
John. Vera pushed it back again into the drawer with a little flush, as
though she had been guilty of an indiscretion in looking at it, and she
said no word of her discovery to the housekeeper. A day or two later she
sought for it again in the same place, but it had been taken away.

But the face thus seen made an impression upon her. She did not forget
it; and when Sir John Kynaston's name was mentioned, she invested him
with the living likeness of the photograph she had seen.

On this particular October morning that Vera strolled up idly to the old
house she did not feel inclined to wander among the deserted rooms; the
sunshine came down too pleasantly through the autumn leaves; the air was
too full of the lingering breath of the dying summer for her to care to
go indoors. She paused a minute by the open window of the housekeeper's