So, with a brain busy with guile and stratagem, she trod on, beneath the eyes of the simple and spotless Dead.
Vernon, thus left alone, mused a few moments on what had passed between himself and the heiress; and then, slowly retracing his steps, his eye roved along the stately series of his line.

"Faith!" he muttered, "if my boyhood had been passed in this old gallery, his Royal Highness would have lost a good fellow and hard drinker, and his Majesty would have had perhaps a more distinguished soldier,--certainly a worthier subject.

If I marry this lady, and we are blessed with a son, he shall walk through this gallery once a day before he is flogged into Latin!" Lucretia's interview with her uncle was a masterpiece of art.

What pity that such craft and subtlety were wasted in our little day, and on such petty objects; under the Medici, that spirit had gone far to the shaping of history.

Sure, from her uncle's openness, that he would plunge at once into the subject for which she deemed she was summoned, she evinced no repugnance when, tenderly kissing her, he asked if Charles Vernon had a chance of winning favour in her eyes.