“What then, sir? Why, only that I think Sir Robert Linne should have kept his wife’s name out of an advertisement.”
“Pooh! She takes her husband’s status; and she is a noble wench, by George, and will never bring him to shame.”
“Or he, her, of course,” said Miss Angela—“and, Davy, ’tis time you put on your pinafore and went to play in the nursery.”
And here ends the story—so far as it relates to the personages of this history—of the wonderful ruby that went by the name of the Lake of Wine. And here—or there, set in a leafy swale of the lonely Hampshire downs—stood until somewhat recently the ruins of that fallen house that superstition must still be peopling with spectres. They are gone now, the ruins. When the historian last saw them, a profound silence reigned within the broken walls; a riot of “devil’s-rope” and ground-elder filled the deep hollows of the courts; the ivy stems were grown ancient; and flitting about the green melancholy, a brimstone butterfly was blown aloft like a flake of the destroying fire that the spirit of romance had breathed into life again.
And now a model farm, rising from the wreck, has disciplined the wild fields to a very pretty behaviour, and the ghosts are fled before the terror of the Psychical Society.
THE END.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES.
The following misspellings (assumed to be dialects or drunken slurs) in dialogue have been preserved:
[Chapter XI]
“is to my knowledge a scholard and an angler”