meant ruin--absolute, irretrievable ruin, and with it
the loss of his stately home that had been the pride of
the Oxheads for generations. More than that--the world
would now know the awful secret of his life.

The earl bowed his head in the bitterness of his sorrow,
for he came of a proud stock. About him hung the portraits
of his ancestors. Here on the right an Oxhead who had
broken his lance at Crecy, or immediately before it.
There McWhinnie Oxhead who had ridden madly from the
stricken field of Flodden to bring to the affrighted
burghers of Edinburgh all the tidings that he had been
able to gather in passing the battlefield. Next him hung
the dark half Spanish face of Sir Amyas Oxhead of
Elizabethan days whose pinnace was the first to dash to
Plymouth with the news that the English fleet, as nearly
as could be judged from a reasonable distance, seemed
about to grapple with the Spanish Armada. Below this,
the two Cavalier brothers, Giles and Everard Oxhead, who
had sat in the oak with Charles II. Then to the right
again the portrait of Sir Ponsonby Oxhead who had fought
with Wellington in Spain, and been dismissed for it.

Immediately before the earl as he sat was the family
escutcheon emblazoned above the mantelpiece. A child
might read the simplicity of its proud significance--an
ox rampant quartered in a field of gules with a pike
dexter and a dog intermittent in a plain parallelogram
right centre, with the motto, "Hic, haec, hoc, hujus,
hujus, hujus."