CHAPTER III.

CONFERENCES.

The next day Sir Miles did not appear at breakfast,--not that he was
unwell, but that he meditated holding certain audiences, and on such
occasions the good old gentleman liked to prepare himself. He belonged
to a school in which, amidst much that was hearty and convivial, there
was much also that nowadays would seem stiff and formal, contrasting the
other school immediately succeeding him, which Mr. Vernon represented,
and of which the Charles Surface of Sheridan is a faithful and admirable
type. The room that Sir Miles appropriated to himself was, properly
speaking, the state apartment, called, in the old inventories, "King
James's chamber;" it was on the first floor, communicating with the
picture-gallery, which at the farther end opened upon a corridor
admitting to the principal bedrooms. As Sir Miles cared nothing for
holiday state, he had unscrupulously taken his cubiculum in this chamber,
which was really the handsomest in the house, except the banquet-hall,
placed his bed in one angle with a huge screen before it, filled up the
space with his Italian antiquities and curiosities; and fixed his
favourite pictures on the faded gilt leather panelled on the walls. His
main motive in this was the communication with the adjoining gallery,
which, when the weather was unfavourable, furnished ample room for his
habitual walk. He knew how many strides by the help of his crutch made a
mile, and this was convenient. Moreover, he liked to look, when alone,
on those old portraits of his ancestors, which he had religiously
conserved in their places, preferring to thrust his Florentine and
Venetian masterpieces into bedrooms and parlours, rather than to dislodge
from the gallery the stiff ruffs, doublets, and farthingales of his
predecessors. It was whispered in the house that the baronet, whenever