"Nothing," he said.
"And is there one of them here, in this house, that I could see him!"
"The portrait," he said, "of the last one, the one who saw her on the coast of Brittany, is above the mantel in the other room."
"Let us go in and see him," she said.
They arose, leaving the breakfast untasted on the sideboard, and went out along the stone passage, into the other room. It, too, remained the same as on the day that the Marchesa entered it. The high window looking out over the fairy village, with the blue-haired ghost dog on his white stone doorstep; and, between, the Ardoch and the road leading to the iron door; and, within, the skins on the floor, the books in their cases, the guns behind the diagonal panes of leaded glass.
They stopped by the fire, under the smoke-stained portrait. For a little while they were silent there, before this ancestor looking down from his canvas. Then the man spoke.
"I think, Caroline," he said, "that all the love with which these dead men have loved you has been passed on to me.... And I think, Caroline, that you are somehow the answer to their longings.... I think that with a single consuming passion, one after the other, with an endless longing, these dead men have finally loved you into life—by the power of kisses that touched nothing, longings that availed nothing, loving that returned nothing.... And, with all this accumulated inheritance, is it any wonder that every nerve, every fiber, every blood drop of me is steeped in the love of you?"
The woman had remained unmoving, looking at the portrait above the mantel in its smoke-stained frame, now she turned slowly.
"Lift me up," she said.
He took her up and lifted her from the floor. But the long-withheld reward of that ancestor was denied him. When she came to the level of the man's shoulders, he suddenly gathered her into his arms. Her eyes closed, her lips trembled, the long sleeves of the morning gown fell away, her bare arms went warm and close around his neck.