"Ah, consider me at least your slave!" whispered Vernon, as, his eye
resting on the contour of that matchless neck, partially and
advantageously turned from him, he began, with his constitutional
admiration of the sex, to feel interested in a pursuit that now seemed,
after piquing, to flatter his self-love.

"Then I will use the privilege when we meet again," answered Lucretia;
and drawing her arm gently from his, she passed on to her uncle, leaving
Vernon midway in the gallery.

Those faded portraits looked down on her with that melancholy gloom which
the effigies of our dead ancestors seem mysteriously to acquire. To
noble and aspiring spirits, no homily to truth and honour and fair
ambition is more eloquent than the mute and melancholy canvas from which
our fathers, made, by death, our household gods, contemplate us still.
They appear to confide to us the charge of their unblemished names. They
speak to us from the grave, and heard aright, the pride of family is the
guardian angel of its heirs. But Lucretia, with her hard and scholastic
mind, despised as the veriest weakness all the poetry that belongs to the
sense of a pure descent. It was because she was proud as the proudest in
herself that she had nothing but contempt for the virtue, the valour, or
the wisdom of those that had gone before. So, with a brain busy with
guile and stratagem, she trod on, beneath the eyes of the simple and
spotless Dead.

Vernon, thus left alone, mused a few moments on what had passed between
himself and the heiress; and then, slowly retracing his steps, his eye
roved along the stately series of his line. "Faith!" he muttered, "if my
boyhood had been passed in this old gallery, his Royal Highness would