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some invisible ceremony. Was it an unending platonic dialogue they listened to, between nothingness and the dust of the generations? or did the living souls of all the animate creatures that were asleep just then—men and women under their blankets, cattle under their hurdles, wild fowl under their marsh reeds—gather together “on such a night as this,” a queer, twittering, bleating, weeping, bodiless crowd, animulœ, vagulœ, blandulœ, and hold a secular consistory above those cold slabs?
    There, at any rate, they all lay, the Ashovers of Ashover! Their two descendants, the fair one and the dark one, pressed their foreheads very close to the window and surveyed the well-known marble images and the brass inscriptions on the stone floor.
    The most imposing effigy of them all was that of Benjamin Ashover, the 18th-century Deist, the friend of Voltaire.
    The mortuary grandeur of this sturdy infidel threw all the rest into the shade. Clumsy classical cupids, with less resemblance to cherubs than to wine bottles, supported the plump pillow on which rested the well-shaped, supercilious head; nor could anything exceed the patronizing complacency with which this bewigged unbeliever contemplated his present surroundings!
    Very different was the expression of Sir Robert Ashover, the cavalier victim of Oliver Cromwell.
    Wistful and indignant, in lace collar and embroidered coat, this defender of old illusions stared out of his marble frame with an expression of melancholy surprise at the lack of gentlemanliness, or even of common decency, in “the ways of God to Man.”
    More different still from the philosopher’s smirk was the impenetrable aloofness, stern and forbidding, of Lord Roger of Ashover, the Crusader.
    With his mailed hands crossed, with his hound at his feet, with his unsheathed sword at his side, Lord Roger looked like a man-at-arms of Eternity, deep asleep, while the armies of Time trampled past him.
    “ E la sua volontate è nostra pace,” his lips seemed to say under his pointed beard!
    Rook and Lexie drew back together from the window and returned in silence to the gravel path that led to the gate.
    Once outside in the road they both became conscious that the luminous mystery above them had worked some kind of sorcery upon their nerves, had vampirized in some perceptible way their life energy.
    Every grass blade, every tree trunk, every gatepost, was still floating in a lovely transparent liquid trance.
    But when the two men had parted from each other, and Rook, pausing on the bridge to listen to his brother’s dragging footsteps and tapping stick, had become suddenly conscious that there was an alteration in the feel of the air, the echo of Lexie’s final words returned to him.
    “She has never been really friendly to the human race. Never really friendly! It’s a shame we can’t wait here together, brother Rook, until we can smell the dawn!”

CHAPTER II
    T HE rain lashed against the window panes of the dining room of Ashover House. Netta Page sat facing the window in a tall straight-backed chair.
    She had finished her breakfast. She sat with her chin on her hands‚ her elbows on the table‚ her eyes staring in front of her.
    There were no other people in the room. Rook and Lady Ann had breakfasted together earlier. Mrs. Ashover never appeared till midday. The same situation had repeated itself many times already; and these lonely morning meals were by no means distasteful to Netta.
    As she sat now in that straight-backed chair her eyes were fixed steadily on the rain; but her thoughts were focussed on the figure of a little old lady in a black satin dress who had just passed her on the staircase.
    It was not a nice experience to be looked through as if you were transparent and as if the balustrade on the other side of your body were requiring a new coat of paint; but it was a still more unpleasant sensation to be given a glance that resembled a sharp stinging smack on the cheek; and Netta, in