sought adventures in America, and seems, generally speaking, to have been
less of a nonentity than his ancestors. He married, when no longer very
young, Alice, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, a beautiful young heiress from a
neighbouring county. "It was the first time an Oke married a Pomfret," my
host informed me, "and the last time. The Pomfrets were quite different
sort of people--restless, self-seeking; one of them had been a favourite of
Henry VIII." It was clear that William Oke had no feeling of having any
Pomfret blood in his veins; he spoke of these people with an evident family
dislike--the dislike of an Oke, one of the old, honourable, modest stock,
which had quietly done its duty, for a family of fortune-seekers and Court
minions. Well, there had come to live near Okehurst, in a little house
recently inherited from an uncle, a certain Christopher Lovelock, a young
gallant and poet, who was in momentary disgrace at Court for some love
affair. This Lovelock had struck up a great friendship with his neighbours
of Okehurst--too great a friendship, apparently, with the wife, either for
her husband's taste or her own. Anyhow, one evening as he was riding home
alone, Lovelock had been attacked and murdered, ostensibly by highwaymen,
but as was afterwards rumoured, by Nicholas Oke, accompanied by his wife
dressed as a groom. No legal evidence had been got, but the tradition had
remained. "They used to tell it us when we were children," said my host, in
a hoarse voice, "and to frighten my cousin--I mean my wife--and me with
stories about Lovelock. It is merely a tradition, which I hope may die out,
as I sincerely pray to heaven that it may be false." "Alice--Mrs. Oke--you
see," he went on after some time, "doesn't feel about it as I do. Perhaps I
am morbid. But I do dislike having the old story raked up."

And we said no more on the subject.