Here were the family portraits.
“Odalite, here are the originals of all the ghosts I saw with my eyes shut, on last night’s journey, and of all the ghosts I saw here on the battlements and in the courtyard—all, all, all—men-at-arms, squires, knights, lords and ladies. If they would but talk, what interesting shades they would be!”
“Which, Wynnette? The ghosts or the pictures?”
“Either. Both. This, you say, Mrs. Kelsy, was Elfrida, Lady Enderby, my mother’s mother? Why, I should have known it. How much she is like my mother, and like Elva. And this is the second and last Lady Enderby? How lovely, yet how fragile. She was mamma’s stepmother, and she died young, leaving one delicate little boy, our uncle, the present earl. Sic transit, and so forth.”
They spent an hour in the picture gallery, and then the housekeeper proposed that they go into the library.
“But we cannot go there. Papa, mamma and uncle are shut up there, in close council,” said Odalite.
“Ah! Well, we will go upstairs, if you please, miss,” said Kelsy.
And upstairs they went. And all over the vast building they went, finding only gloomy rooms, each one more depressing than the others.
“And now show me the room Queen Elizabeth slept in when on a visit to Baron Ealon, of Enderby,” said Wynnette.
“Queen Elizabeth, miss! I never heard that Queen Elizabeth was ever in this part of the country!” the housekeeper exclaimed.