"How childish he is!" she exclaimed when we were alone. "He really minds,
really feels disgraced by what our ancestors did two centuries and a half
ago. I do believe William would have those two portraits taken down and
burned if he weren't afraid of me and ashamed of the neighbours. And as it
is, these two people really are the only two members of our family that
ever were in the least interesting. I will tell you the story some day."

As it was, the story was told to me by Oke himself. The next day, as we
were taking our morning walk, he suddenly broke a long silence, laying
about him all the time at the sere grasses with the hooked stick that he
carried, like the conscientious Kentishman he was, for the purpose of
cutting down his and other folk's thistles.

"I fear you must have thought me very ill-mannered towards my wife
yesterday," he said shyly; "and indeed I know I was."

Oke was one of those chivalrous beings to whom every woman, every wife--and
his own most of all--appeared in the light of something holy. "But--but--I
have a prejudice which my wife does not enter into, about raking up ugly
things in one's own family. I suppose Alice thinks that it is so long ago
that it has really got no connection with us; she thinks of it merely as a
picturesque story. I daresay many people feel like that; in short, I am
sure they do, otherwise there wouldn't be such lots of discreditable family
traditions afloat. But I feel as if it were all one whether it was long ago
or not; when it's a question of one's own people, I would rather have it
forgotten. I can't understand how people can talk about murders in their
families, and ghosts, and so forth."

"Have you any ghosts at Okehurst, by the way?" I asked. The place seemed as