Not for worlds would she have had him know it.  Her love for him was too deep to let her shrink; and she knew that only by that love did she maintain her ascendancy, appealing to his higher nature as only true love can appeal.  But the perpetual strain of it told upon her, and that night she felt tired in body and soul.

The great bedroom behind her with its dark hangings and oak furniture seemed dreary and unhome-like.  She viewed the ancient and immense four-poster with misgiving and wondered if Queen Elizabeth had ever slept in it.

After a time she investigated Piers’ room beyond, and found it less imposing though curiously stiff and wholly lacking in ordinary cheery comfort.  Later she discovered the reason for this grim severity of arrangement.  No woman’s touch had softened it for close upon half a century.

She went back to her own room and dressed.  Piers had wanted her to have a maid, but she had refused until other changes should be made in the establishment.  There seemed so much to alter that she felt bewildered.  A household of elderly menservants presented a problem with which she knew she would find it difficult to deal.

She put the matter gently before Piers that night, but he dismissed it as trivial.

“You can’t turn ’em off of course,” he said.  “But you can have a dozen women to adjust the balance if you want ’em.”

Avery did not, but she was too tired to argue the point.  She let the subject slide.

They dined together in the oak-panelled dining-room where Piers had so often sat with his grandfather.  The table seemed to stretch away inimitably into shadows, and Avery felt like a Lilliputian.  From the wall directly facing her the last Lady Evesham smiled upon her—­her baffling, mirthless smile that seemed to cover naught but heartache.  She found herself looking up again and again to meet those eyes of mocking comprehension; and the memory of what Lennox Tudor had once told her recurred to her.  This was Piers’ Italian grandmother whose patrician beauty had descended to him through her scapegrace son.

“Are you looking at that woman with the smile?” said Piers abruptly.

She turned to him.  “You are so like her, Piers.  But I wouldn’t like you to have a smile like that.  There is something tragic behind it.”

“We are a tragic family,” said Piers sombrely.  “As for her, she ruined her own life and my grandfather’s too.  She might have been happy enough with him if she had tried.”

“Oh, Piers, I wonder!” Avery said, with a feeling that that smile revealed more to her than to him.

“I say she might,” Piers reiterated, with a touch of impatience.  “He thought the world of her, just as—­just as—­” he smiled at her suddenly—­“I do of you.  He never knew that she wasn’t satisfied until one fine day she left him.  She married again—­afterwards, and then died.  He never got over it.”

But still Avery had a vagrant feeling of pity for the woman who had been Sir Beverley’s bride.  “I expect they never really understood each other,” she said.