Lesbia went up the grand staircase, through the long corridors, in a dream of wonder.  Brought up at Fellside, in that new part of the Westmoreland house which had been built by her grandmother and had no history, she felt thrilled by the sober splendour of this fine old manorial mansion.  All was sound and substantial, as if created yesterday, so well preserved had been the goods and chattels of the noble race; and yet all wore such unmistakeable marks of age.  The deep rich colouring of the wainscot, the faded hues of the tapestry, the draperies of costliest velvet and brocade, were all sobered by the passing of years.

Mr. Smithson had shown his good taste in having kept all things as Sir Hubert Heronville, the last of his race, had left them; and the Heronvilles had been one of those grand old Tory races which change nothing of the past.

Lady Lesbia’s bedroom was the State chamber, which had been occupied by kings and queens in days of yore.  That grandiose four-poster, with the carved ebony columns, cut velvet curtains, and plumes of ostrich feathers, had been built for Elizabeth, when she deigned to include Rood Hall in one of her royal progresses.  Charles the First had rested his weary head upon those very pillows, before he went on to the Inn at Uxbridge, where he was to be lodged less luxuriously.  James the Second had stayed there when Duke of York, with Mistress Anne Hyde, before he acknowledged his marriage to the multitude; and Anne’s daughter had occupied the same room as Queen of England forty years later; and now the Royal Chamber, with adjacent dressing-room, and oratory, and spacious boudoir all in the same suite, was reserved for Lady Lesbia Haselden.

‘I’m afraid you are spoiling me,’ she told Mr. Smithson, when he asked if she approved of the rooms that had been allotted to her.  ’I feel quite ashamed of myself among the ghosts of dead and gone queens.’

’Why so?  Surely the Royalty of beauty has as divine a right as that of an anointed sovereign.’

‘I hope the Royal personages don’t walk,’ exclaimed Lady Kirkbank, in her girlish tone; ’this is just the house in which one would expect ghosts.’

Whereupon Mrs. Mostyn hastened to enlighten the company upon the real causes of ghost-seeing, which she had lately studied in Carpenter’s ‘Mental Physiology,’ and favoured them with a diluted version of the views of that authority.

This was at afternoon tea in the library, where the brass-wired bookcases, filled with mighty folios and handsome octavos in old bindings, looked as if they had not been opened for a century.  The literature of past ages furnished the room, and made a delightful background.  The literature of the present lay about on the tables, and testified that the highest intellectual flight of the inhabitants of Rood Hall was a dip into the Contemporary or the Nineteenth Century, or the perusal of the last new scandal in the shape of Reminiscences or Autobiography.  One large round table was consecrated to Mudie, another to Rolandi.  On the one side you had Mrs. Oliphant, on the other Zola, exemplifying the genius of the two nations.