“I wouldn’t mind telling her anything if she were a real heathen,” was Mary’s earnest answer.  “But trying to break through her reserve is a harder task than butting a hole through the Chinese wall.  You’ve no idea how haughty she is.  Well, I don’t care—­much.”

She cared enough, however, to take a lively interest in her room-mate’s pedigree, after seeing the crest on her note paper.  Later in the morning when some literature references made it necessary for her to go to the library, she looked around for a certain fat volume she had pored over several times during those idle days before the beginning of school.  It was Burke’s Peerage.  She had looked into it because of the story of Edryn, finding many mottoes as interesting as the one in the great amber window on the stairs.  Now she turned to the B’s and rapidly scanned the columns till she came to the Berkeleys.  For generations there had been an Evelyn in the family.  What a long, long time they had had to shape their lives by their motto, and grow worthy of their family traditions!  No wonder that Evelyn had that air of gentle breeding and calm poise like Madam Chartley’s.

Mary had already on a previous occasion looked in vain for the name of Ware, and when she failed to find it, consoled herself with the thought that for three hundred years it had been handed down with honour in the annals of New England.  Staunch patriots the Wares had been in the old colony days, sturdy and stern of conscience, and Mary had been taught to believe that their struggle to wrest a living from the rocky hills while they built up a state was as worthy of honour as any knightly deed of the Round Table.  She was prouder of those early ancestors who delved and spun and toiled with their hands at yeoman tasks, than the later ones, who were ministers and judges and college professors.

Until now she had never attached any importance to the fact that a branch of her mother’s family had been a titled one, because she was such a patriotic little American, and because so many years had elapsed since that particular branch had severed its connection with the family in the old world.  But now Mary felt a peculiar thrill of satisfaction when she found the name in the peerage and realized that some of the blue blood which had inspired those great-great-grandfathers to knightly deeds was coursing through her own veins.  The crest was a winged spur, with the motto, “Ready, aye ready.”

“Maybe that is the reason the ‘King’s call’ has come to me as it did to Edryn,” she mused, her chin in her hand and her eyes gazing dreamily out of the window.  Then she forgot all about her quest for the literature references, for in her revery she was listening to the Voices again, and seeing herself in a dimly foreshadowed future, the centre of an acclaiming crowd.  What great part she was to play she did not know, but when the time should come for the fulfilment of her high destiny, she would rise to meet it like the winged spur, crying “Ready, aye ready,” as all those brave ancestors had done.  It was in the blood to respond thus.