Lady Elfrida, half bold, yet half frightened, halting beside a pillar
of the chancel. But there was nothing of the dead about her: she was
radiating and pulsating with the uncompromising and material freshness
of English girlhood. The wild rose in the hedgerow was not more tangible
than her cheek, nor the summer sky more clearly cool and blue than her
eyes. The vigor of health and unfettered freedom of limb was in her
figure from her buckled walking-shoe to her brown hair topped by a
sailor hat. The assurance and contentment of a well-ordered life, of
secured position and freedom from vain anxieties or expectations, were
visible in every line of her refined, delicate, and evenly quiescent
features. And yet Lady Elfrida, for the first time in her girlhood, felt
a little nervous.

Yet she was frank, too, with the frankness of those who have no thought
of being misunderstood. She said she had come there out of curiosity to
see how he would "get on" with his ancestors. She had been watching him
from the chancel ever since he came,--and she was disappointed. As far
as emotion went she thought he had the advantage of the stoniest and
longest dead of them all. Perhaps he did not like them? But he must be
careful what he SAID, for some of her own people were there,--manifestly
this one. (She put the toe of her buckled shoe on the crusader Peter had
just looked at.) And then there was another in the corner. So she had a
right to come there as well as he,--and she could act as cicerone! This
one was a De Brecy, one of King John's knights, who married an Atherly.
(She swung herself into a half-sitting posture on the effigy of the
dead knight, composed her straight short skirt over her trim ankles,
and looked up in Peter's dark face.) That would make them some kind of
relations,--wouldn't it? He must come over to Bentley Towers and see the
rest of the De Brecys in the chapel there to-morrow. Perhaps there might
be some he liked better, and who looked more like him. For there was no