And [is] this, then, he thought to himself, the establishment of which
some rumor had been preserved? Was it here that the secret had its
hiding-place in the old coffer, in the cupboard, in the secret chamber,
or whatever was indicated by the apparently idle words of the document
which he had preserved? He still smiled at the idea, but it was with a
pleasant, mysterious sense that his life had at last got out of the dusty
real, and that strangeness had mixed itself up with his daily experience.

With such feelings he prepared himself to go down to dinner with his
host. He found him alone at table, which was placed in a dark old room
modernized with every English comfort and the pleasant spectacle of a
table set with the whitest of napery and the brightest of glass and
china. The friendly old gentleman, as he had found him from the first,
became doubly and trebly so in that position which brings out whatever
warmth of heart an Englishman has, and gives it to him if he has none.
The impressionable and sympathetic character of Middleton answered to the
kindness of his host; and by the time the meal was concluded, the two
were conversing with almost as much zest and friendship as if they were
similar in age, even fellow-countrymen, and had known one another all
their life-time. Middleton's secret, it may be supposed, came often to
the tip of his tongue; but still he kept it within, from a natural
repugnance to bring out the one romance of his life. The talk, however,
necessarily ran much upon topics among which this one would have come in
without any extra attempt to introduce it.

"This decay of old families," said the Master, "is much greater than
would appear on the surface of things. We have such a reluctance to part
with them, that we are content to see them continued by any fiction,
through any indirections, rather than to dispense with old names. In your
country, I suppose, there is no such reluctance; you are willing that one