kinder than my other cousins.”
Their talk took place in the wainscoted parlour, where the family had taken their meals in ordinary for at least two centuries past, and which, as we have said, was hung with portraits of the race. Over Madam Bernstein's great chair was a Kneller, one of the most brilliant pictures of the gallery, representing a young lady of three or four and twenty, in the easy flowing dress and loose robes of Queen Anne's time—a hand on a cushion near her, a quantity of auburn hair parted off a fair forehead, and flowing over pearly shoulders and a lovely neck. Under this sprightly picture the lady sate with her knitting-needles.
When Harry asked, “Are you my cousin, too?” she said, “That picture is by Sir Godfrey, who thought himself the greatest painter in the world. But he was not so good as Lely, who painted your grandmother—my—my Lady Castlewood, Colonel Esmond's wife; nor he so good as Sir Anthony Van Dyck, who painted your great-grandfather, yonder—and who looks, Harry, a much finer gentleman than he was. Some of us are painted blacker than we are. Did you recognise your grandmother in that picture? She had the loveliest fair hair and shape of any woman of her time.”
“I fancied I knew the portrait from instinct, perhaps, and a certain likeness to my mother.”
“Did Mrs. Warrington—I beg her pardon, I think she calls herself Madam or my Lady Esmond now——?”
“They call my mother so in our province,” said the boy.
“Did she never tell you of another daughter her mother had in England, before she married your grandfather?”
“She never spoke of one.”
“Nor your grandfather?”
“Never. But in his picture-books, which he constantly made for us children, he used to draw a head very like that above your ladyship. That, and Viscount Francis, and King James III., he drew a score of times, I am sure.”
“And the picture over me reminds you of no one, Harry?”
“No, indeed.”
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