For in that particular October Patricia’s father, an accommodating physician having declared old Roger Stapylton’s health to necessitate a Southern sojourn, leased the Bellingham mansion in Lichfield.  It happened that, by rare good luck, Tom Bellingham—­of the Bellinghams of Assequin, not the Bellinghams of Bellemeade, who indeed immigrated after the War of 1812 and have never been regarded as securely established from a social standpoint,—­was at this time in pecuniary difficulties on account of having signed another person’s name to a cheque.

Roger Stapylton refurnished the house in the extreme degree of Lichfieldian elegance.  Colonel Musgrave was his mentor throughout the process; and the oldest families of Lichfield very shortly sat at table with the former overseer, and not at all unwillingly, since his dinners were excellent and an infatuated Rudolph Musgrave—­an axiom now in planning any list of guests,—­was very shortly to marry the man’s daughter.

In fact, the matter had been settled; and Colonel Musgrave had received from Roger Stapylton an exuberantly granted charter of courtship.

This befell, indeed, upon a red letter day in Roger Stapylton’s life.  The banker was in business matters wonderfully shrewd, as divers transactions, since the signing of that half-forgotten contract whereby he was to furnish a certain number of mules for the Confederate service, strikingly attested:  but he had rarely been out of the country wherein his mother bore him; and where another nabob might have dreamed of an earl, or even have soared aspiringly in imagination toward a marchioness-ship for his only child, old Stapylton retained unshaken faith in the dust-gathering creed of his youth.

He had tolerated Pevensey, had indeed been prepared to purchase him much as he would have ordered any other expensive trinket or knickknack which Patricia desired.  But he had never viewed the match with enthusiasm.

Now, though, old Stapylton exulted.  His daughter—­half a Vartrey already—­would become by marriage a Musgrave of Matocton, no less.  Pat’s carriage would roll up and down the oak-shaded avenue from which he had so often stepped aside with an uncovered head, while gentlemen and ladies cantered by; and it would be Pat’s children that would play about the corridors of the old house at whose doors he had lived so long,—­those awe-inspiring corridors, which he had very rarely entered, except on Christmas Day and other recognized festivities, when, dressed to the nines, the overseer and his uneasy mother were by immemorial custom made free of the mansion, with every slave upon the big plantation.

“They were good days, sir,” he chuckled.  “Heh, we’ll stick to the old customs.  We’ll give a dinner and announce it at dessert, just as your honored grandfather did your Aunt Constantia’s betrothal—­”

For about the Musgraves of Matocton there could be no question.  It was the old man’s delight to induce Rudolph Musgrave to talk concerning his ancestors; and Stapylton soon had their history at his finger-tips.  He could have correctly blazoned every tincture in their armorial bearings and have explained the origin of every rampant, counter-changed or couchant beast upon the shield.