"Helena!" said Colonel Stanburne one morning when he came down to breakfast, "I've determined on a bold stroke. I'm going to take the tandem this morning to Stanithburn Peel, to see young Philip Stanburne and get him to accept a captaincy in the new regiment."
Her ladyship did not see why this should be called a bold stroke, so she asked if the road were particularly dangerous to drive upon, and suggested that, if it were, one horse would be safer than two.
"That's not it. The sort of courage wanted on the present occasion, my dear Helena, is moral courage and not physical courage, don't you see? Did you never hear the history of the Stanburnes of Stanithburn? Surely female ignorance does not go so far as to leave you uninformed about such a distinguished family as ours?"
"I know the history of its present representative, or at least as much of it as he chooses to tell me."
"Error added to ignorance! I am not the representative of the family. We of Wenderholme are only a younger branch. The real representative is Philip Stanburne, of Stanithburn Peel."
"I scarcely ever heard of him before. I had some vague notion that such a person existed. Why does he never come here?"
"It's a long story, but you will find it all in the county histories. In Henry the Eighth's time Sir Philip Stanburne was a rebel and got beheaded, some people say hanged, for treason, so his estates were confiscated. Wenderholme and Stanithburn Tower were given back to the family in the next generation, but the elder branch had only Stanithburn, which is a much smaller estate than this. Since then they married heiresses, but always regularly spent their fortunes, and now young Philip Stanburne has nothing but the tower with a small estate of bad land which brings him in four or five hundred a-year."
"Not much certainly; but why does he never come here?"
"My father used to say that there had been no intercourse between Stanithburn and Wenderholme for three hundred years. Most likely the separation was a religious quarrel, to begin with. The elder branch always remained strictly Roman Catholic; but the Wenderholme branch was more prudent, and turned Protestant in Queen Elizabeth's time."