and an excellent work of art it was too, in its own solemn academic
kind. The dining-room, tiny as it was, possessed that inevitable
Canaletti without which no gentleman's dining-room in England
is ever considered to be complete. Everything spoke at once the
stereotyped Society style of a dozen years ago (before Mr. Morris
had reformed the outer aspect of the West End), entirely free from
anything so startling or indecorous as a gleam of spontaneity in
the possessor's mind. To be sure, it was very far indeed from the
centre round-table and brilliant-flowered-table-cover style of the
utter unregenerate Philistine household; but it was further still
from the simple natural taste acd graceful fancy of Edie Oswald's
cosy little back parlour behind the village grocer's shop at
Calcombe-Pomeroy.

The portrait and the Canaletti were relics of Lady Le Breton's best
days, when Sir Owen was alive, and the boys were still in their
first babyhood. Sir Owen was an Indian officer of the old school,
a simple-minded, gentle, brave man, very religious after his
own fashion, and an excellent soldier, with the true Anglo-Indian
faculty for administration and organisation. It was partly from
him, no doubt, that the boys inherited their marked intelligence;
and it was wholly from him, beyond any doubt at all, that Ernest
and his younger brother Ronald inherited their moral or religious
sincerity--for that was an element in which poor formally orthodox
Lady Le Breton was wholly deficient. The good General had been
brought up in the strictest doctrines of the Clapham sect; he had
gone to India young, as a cadet from Haileybury; and he had applied
his intellect all his life long rather to the arduous task of
extending 'the blessings of British rule' to Sikhs and Ghoorkas, than
to those abstract ethical or theological questions which agitated