paused before the cold altar, and started, for beside him lay the recumbent figure of a warrior pillowed on his helmet with the paraphernalia of his trade around him.  A sudden childish memory of the great Western plains, and the biers of the Indian “braves” raised on upright poles against the staring sky and above the sunbaked prairie, rushed upon him.  There, too, had lain the weapons of the departed chieftain; there, too, lay the Indian’s “faithful hound,” here simulated by the cross-legged crusader’s canine effigy.  And now, strangest of all, he found that this unlooked-for recollection and remembrance thrilled him more at that moment than the dead before him.  Here they rested,—­the Atherlys of centuries; recumbent in armor or priestly robes, upright in busts that were periwigged or hidden in long curls, above the marble record of their deeds and virtues.  Some of these records were in Latin,—­an unknown tongue to Peter,—­some in a quaint English almost as unintelligible; but none as foreign to him as the dead themselves.  Their banners waved above his head; their voices filled the silent church, but fell upon his vacant eye and duller ear.  He was none of them.

Presently he was conscious of a footstep, so faint, so subtle, that it might have come from a peregrinating ghost.  He turned quickly and saw Lady Elfrida, half bold, yet half frightened, halting beside a pillar of the chancel.  But there was nothing of the dead about her:  she was radiating and pulsating with the uncompromising and material freshness of English girlhood.  The wild rose in the hedgerow was not more tangible than her cheek, nor the summer sky more clearly cool and blue than her eyes.  The vigor of health and unfettered freedom of limb was in her figure from her buckled walking-shoe to her brown hair topped by a sailor hat.  The assurance and contentment of a well-ordered life, of secured position and freedom from vain anxieties or expectations, were visible in every line of her refined, delicate, and evenly quiescent features.  And yet Lady Elfrida, for the first time in her girlhood, felt a little nervous.

Yet she was frank, too, with the frankness of those who have no thought of being misunderstood.  She said she had come there out of curiosity to see how he would “get on” with his ancestors.  She had been watching him from the chancel ever since he came,—­and she was disappointed.  As far as emotion went she thought he had the advantage of the stoniest and longest dead of them all.  Perhaps he did not like them?  But he must be careful what he said, for some of her own people were there,—­manifestly this one. (She put the toe of her buckled shoe on the crusader Peter had just looked at.) And then there was another in the corner.  So she had a right to come there as well as he,—­and she could act as cicerone!  This one was a De Brecy, one of King John’s knights, who married an Atherly.  (She swung herself into a half-sitting posture on the effigy of the dead knight, composed her straight short skirt over her trim ankles, and looked up in Peter’s dark face.) That would make them some kind of relations,—­wouldn’t it?  He must come over to Bentley Towers and see the rest of the De Brecys in the chapel there to-morrow.  Perhaps there might be some he liked better, and who looked more like him.  For there was no one here or at the Grange who resembled him in the least.