“That sounds easy enough,” said Lord Norman, “and any ordinary person could do it; but a duke can’t. He’s got to live up to his position. It’s a kind of duty. And so all the houses go on full swing, and a kind of royal state is kept up. The duke is treated like a prince. There’s an army of servants at Belfayre, and the stables are full of horses and carriages, and the whole place is like a palace. It’s a show-place.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Well, people go and see it because there’s a lot of pictures there, and old plate and china, and curiosities that one duke after another has collected. There are some pictures that are worth thousands, and people come from the other end of the world to stare at them.”
“Why don’t they sell them?” asked Esmeralda.
“They can’t,” said Lord Norman. “They’ve borrowed money on them, and if they hadn’t they couldn’t sell them. It would be a kind of sacrilege.”
“I don’t understand it all,” said Esmeralda. “I shouldn’t like to live in a place that I might be turned out of any moment.”
“That’s why I said ‘poor Trafford,’” said Lord Norman. “He feels just as you do. He said one day, when I was at Belfayre, that he wished he was a farm laborer; and that he was a perfect slave.”
She was silent for a minute or two, and Lord Norman, gazing at her with all his heart in his eyes, had forgotten the house of Belfayre and its difficulties, and everything but the fact of her presence, and her delicate profile standing out like a cameo, when she said, suddenly:
“Who is ‘Ada’?”