It was only after he had shown her around the picture gallery on the following Sunday afternoon that Claire properly appreciated Henry Ballaston. She listened to his last little dissertation—stiff perhaps and a trifle pedantic, and yet in its way eloquent—as to a supposed Romney, with something more than interest, almost enthusiasm. Here was a man who spoke from his heart of things he loved, and a man whom no one in the world, meeting him casually, would have suspected of possessing such a thing as a heart.

“Tell me what first made you love these things so,” she begged.

She had seated herself upon the huge divan at the end of the gallery from which, in the afternoon light, was a wonderful view on one side of the great oil paintings which lined the staircase, and on the other, through the wide-flung mullioned windows, a curiously beautiful vignette of the park with its beech and oak trees, and beyond, at the top of the slope, the famous home covert.

“I have had no other life,” he told her calmly. “At Eton I developed no tastes either for athletics or affairs. At Oxford they spoke of the Church. The suggestion was repugnant to me. I had some inclinations towards Roman Catholicism, but the Ballastons have always been a Protestant family. I considered the army and discarded the idea. All the time, wherever I was, I wanted to come back to Ballaston. In the end I came back. The old librarian here had just died, and somehow or other I drifted into his place. That was twenty-seven years ago and it seems almost like yesterday.”

“A wonderful life!” she murmured.

“It would have suited few other men,” he rejoined. “It has suited me. I have activities out of doors as well as within. There is scarcely a tree in the park, for instance, whose history I could not tell you, nor an acre of the gardens I have not watched through the winter and summer; I have helped to protect the fruits and flowers from the frosts, and tried my best to gather in the sunshine for them. Indoors, of course,” he went on, after a moment’s pause, “has been the scene of my real labours, if labours they can be called. I have catalogued the pictures and the china, the armour and the various curios, after a style of my own, with the history, so far as possible, of each of the masters, the date and a copy of such criticisms as have appeared in the press. The catalogues, you observe, are all written by hand.”

She pored over the vellum-bound manuscript book which he had been carrying, turning the pages, and glancing at the extracts written with great care in a stiff, clerkly handwriting.

“Why, this must have taken you ages,” she exclaimed.

“There are thirty-two similar volumes,” he confided. “The compilation of those alone took me four or five years. I am very fortunate in my tastes, because, you see, I am not an ordinary custodian. I was born with these pictures, these Titians, and Corots and Murillos on the lower staircase, and those others, just as great but with lesser names, that hang upon the left-hand side of the galleries. On rainy days I have walked from end to end and seen something different each day and each day of each year. That is how, I suppose, affection for a home and its treasures grows. That is how, at any rate, in me has grown up a great love for this house and all that it contains. It will never be mine—I do not wish that it should, but I have my share in it. I am a Ballaston and even if I were turned away—and neither Bertram nor Gregory would do that—I think that my spirit would still haunt these staircases.”

“You make one realise,” she sighed, “how we waste our lives caring for indifferent things.”

“The choice is always with us,” he reminded her gently. “In youth, however, there are other tastes and inclinations which it is as well for us to gratify. For instance, I see they have commenced to play tennis, and Lady Annistair is looking towards the house. Shall we go down?”

“Not yet,” she begged. “I am loving being just here. Tell me some more, please.”

“You are very sympathetic,” he acknowledged, “and you see I am disposed to take advantage of you. Sometimes indeed it is a relief to talk of one’s hobby. Bertram loves his home and the traditions of his family almost as I do, but he has lived outside, moved in the great places. They are a sentiment to him, whereas they are a religion to me. And Gregory too—he is a little like that. It is only natural. To me no sort of career has ever appealed. I suppose that is why I have filled my life with this one thing. To-day we have only spoken of and looked at the pictures, but there are other treasures. Every Ballaston for many generations has collected china. One day I must show you our collection. There is something more to be appreciated there than its mere appearance. I will show you what design can really come to mean, what age can do to colouring. Then you will laugh at me, perhaps, but I am almost as foolish about our cellars. I have watched the laying down of all our clarets mid sherries and ports and Madeiras. Season by season I have given away or disposed of all of every vintage that disappointed. That is why every one in the county speaks of the Ballaston cellars. I cannot, alas, bring the new things which make life so easy and luxurious to Ballaston. We have no electric light or heating, and I am afraid you would laugh at our bathrooms. But there are some of our bedchambers which are wonderful. King James’ room, for instance, with the rosewood bedstead and original damask, and the tapestries which were sent from the Palace, has scarcely ever been touched.”

“Let me ask you something,” she begged. “May I? You will not think it impertinent?”

“Ask me what you will, by all means, my dear young lady,” he answered. “You have come here quite unexpectedly, but you have captured all our hearts. It will please me to tell you anything you care to know.”

“Tell me then—there isn’t really any fear that all this may have to go?”

His face was suddenly the face of an old man. The primness of it, the self-control, the sphinx-like mouth, all seemed to fall away together. It was an old man looking at death.

“I cannot answer that question,” he confessed, and even his voice was different, metallic and toneless. “Bertram entered life with great ideas, and unfortunately his wife, who was a gracious and charming lady, and who would have been a great heiress, died when Gregory was born. Then Gregory grew up very much in the same fashion as his father. The war came and no Ballaston ever knew how to save money, or to save himself at other people’s expense. We are in terrible financial straits, and all the time there have been fresh mortgages. I myself am not an expert at business, but I have spent weary days and weeks thinking and adding up and wondering. Unless there is money soon, it seems to me that the lands must all go, and the house be sold up.”

“It would break your hearts,” she said softly.

“It would be death,” he answered. “If I could save Ballaston,” he went on, a little added strength in his voice, a glow, although a steely one, kindling in his eyes, “I would commit any crime on earth. I would kill, I would murder, I would destroy, I would plunge my soul into immortal misery to save the vandals from the auction rooms in London from coming and laying their hands upon the pictures and china and trees, or the furniture, and tramping about the rooms where history has been made. Sometimes lately I have awakened in the night and found myself crying out with fear, found great drops of sweat upon my body, and it hasn’t been a knife at my throat or any horror of that sort, but men with catalogues, little Jew men with pince-nez, peering at the pictures; fat, coarse-looking men floundering through the rooms and looking at the hall-marks of my china through magnifying glasses.”

He paused suddenly. When he spoke again he was a different being.

“My dear young lady,” he apologised, “I beg your pardon. It is not often that I let myself go like this. In fact, to tell you the truth, it has never happened before. Will you excuse me if I hurry you downstairs now? I know that they are waiting, and I must not monopolise you.”

She rose to her feet, still silent, curiously indisposed for speech, feeling in her youth and inexperience that deep though her sympathy and even her understanding, she still had no words to offer.

“You see how one gets,” he concluded, as they descended the stairs, “through dwelling on one subject and one subject only. I am a man with one idea, but for that idea I am willing to live; for that idea I would be quite willing to die.—Here is my nephew Reginald—a little angry with me, I fear, as the others will be, for having kept you so long.”

A tall, fair boy, Gregory’s younger cousin, who had come over from Annistair with his mother, met them in the hall disconsolately.

“I say,” he complained, “I think Uncle Henry has been most unfair. We are all waiting to play tennis with you, Miss Endacott. No one will play another set until you come. Gregory is fuming, the tea is cold, and Mother is quite convinced that you have fallen down an oubliette—there is one somewhere about the place, you know. You’re in disgrace, Uncle Henry, I can tell you!”

They all strolled out on to the lawn, and Claire made her apologies at the tea table.

“Please remember my transatlantic weaknesses,” she begged. “A house like this is more wonderful than any museum. It is just illuminating.—No tea, thanks. Some lemonade and one of those cakes.”

Sir Bertram, who had been playing a single at tennis, shook his racket at his brother.

“Henry,” he declared, “you are sent to Coventry. I appointed you showman with considerable self-sacrifice, and gave you half an hour. You have been away for an hour and a quarter.”

“And we haven’t finished yet,” Claire insisted. “I have had the most interesting afternoon of my life. I don’t believe there is another house like Ballaston in the world.”

“Did you bring home any treasures from China, Gregory?” his cousin asked him. “What is that horrible-looking wooden Image in Uncle Henry’s room?”

“That’s about the only treasure I did bring home,” was the somewhat grim reply. “Worth about a million, I believe, if you knew how to handle him.”

“A most unprepossessing-looking object, my dear Gregory,” his aunt observed. “It may be valuable—I hope for your sake it is, if you didn’t give much for it—but as an ornament it is absolutely repulsive.”

“Just what it is meant to be,” Gregory confided. “It typifies material fortune cut adrift from all redeeming inspiration. Material fortune is the one thing which we do not associate with this house.”

“Don’t get gloomy, Greg,” his cousin drawled. “Here comes my beloved sister at last. Let’s have a four. Aren’t you going to play, Uncle Bertram?”

“The elders,” Sir Bertram replied, “are going to watch your prowess this set.”

“A jeer!” Gregory exclaimed. “Don’t ever let my father take advantage of you that way, Miss Endacott. He can give me fifteen and owe fifteen and beat me when he feels like it.”

They trooped back on to the tennis lawn, played, sat about under the cedar trees, talked and gossiped until nearly seven o’clock. Claire excused herself from playing in the last set and found a chair near where Henry Ballaston was seated.

“I haven’t thanked you half enough for this afternoon,” she said gratefully.

“I am afraid you must have found me very prolix,” he rejoined. “You must excuse an old man with one idea.”

“I think the man with one idea,” she answered, “is the most satisfactory person in the world. As a rule he makes something of it.—You spoke this afternoon for a moment of Sir Bertram’s wife. Tell me more about her.”

“My dear, there is not a great deal to tell,” he replied. “She was a little younger than Bertram, very beautiful, and devotedly attached to him. She was the daughter of the Earl of Rutland, who has an estate on the other side of the county. She died when Gregory was born. If she had lived eighteen months longer, she would have inherited a fortune of nearly three quarters of a million pounds. It was very unfortunate.”

“Was Sir Bertram very much in love with her?”

“Very much indeed. In fact, so far as I know, he has only looked seriously at one other woman since, and she too has come under the shadow of a tragedy. We are not a fortunate family, Miss Endacott.”

“That may come,” she ventured reassuringly. “The treasure of the Image may materialise after all. Somehow or other, I believe that it will.”

“My dear,” he said, “it is a very fantastic story for a simple-minded man to believe, but if there’s truth in it—if there should be truth in it, then I must confess that I am moved by the same spirit which prompted my brother to conceive the expedition and Gregory to risk his life in carrying it out. If the jewels are there, no superstition, no confused sense of morality, no fear even of being branded as a wrong-doer, would stop me for one moment from taking them. In this matter I sympathise with the more bellicose side of my family.”

There was something almost threatening in his words. His eyes were held by an approaching figure. She looked towards the ring-fence which bordered the park. Mr. Endacott had just passed through a little gate and was advancing towards them. In his rather sombre attire and drooping black felt hat, he presented a strange appearance; an appearance half grotesque, half sinister. With expressionless face, he shook hands with Sir Bertram, who came forward to meet him. Although the sun was still very powerful, his cheeks were colourless, he showed no sign of unusual warmth.

“I regret my tardiness,” he said, in reply to some polite speech from his host. “I became absorbed in some work. I failed to notice the hour.”

Sir Bertram led him away to be introduced to his sister. Claire was suddenly aware that her companion had lapsed into speechlessness. His eyes had followed the newcomer’s every movement. They were fixed upon him now in a curious, set gaze. There was an expression in his eyes and about his mouth, which, for a moment, made her shiver.

“Mr. Ballaston!” she exclaimed.

He did not appear to hear her. Instead, he seemed to be muttering something to himself. She saw his lips move but heard no sound.

“Mr. Ballaston!” she repeated.

He was himself again. He rose to his feet.

“I beg your pardon,” he apologised. “I permitted my attention to wander. The coming of your uncle reminds me of a task which I still have to perform.”

He left her with a little bow, and turning towards the house, stiff, formal, precise, keeping always in the middle of the path and ascending the grey stone steps with measured tread, disappeared a few moments later through the wide-flung oak doors. She watched him until he was out of sight, unaccountably disturbed. Then Gregory came and claimed her. There was to be still another set of tennis.