“Your own name, Scarborough, is well known to us.”
A look of instant interest succeeded the polite but weary smile on Miss Scarborough’s face. This expression of weariness was the one flaw in the satisfying beauty of the essayist, one of those rare celebrities the sight of whom is not a shock to admirers. “Tell me about them,” she said.
“The only thing to tell is that all the males of the family perished in a feud twenty-five years ago—a feud so fierce that ‘the Scarborough-Bohun War’ is still referred to with horror. The climax came when Guilford Scarborough and his five sons were ambushed one day by twenty of the Bohuns, and with their backs against a rocky cliff fought until the last fell, a dozen Bohuns paying for victory with their lives. That cliff to-day is called Scarborough’s Doom. One daughter of the race survives.”
But Miss Scarborough seemed not to hear the last sentences.
“Guilford Scarborough!” she exclaimed.
“It was the name of the founder of our family, a poor knight who won renown and an earldom by saving the king’s life at Agincourt. From that day it has been the favorite name for our sons.
“The present earl, the head of our family in England, bears it; my great-great-grandfather—a second son of the twelfth earl—who left England and settled an estate in Virginia the middle of the eighteenth century, bore it.”
She spoke simply, rapidly,—evidently descent from and kinship with earls was only one of the many fortuitous circumstances of her brilliant life.
“This Guilford of Virginia,” she continued, “had two sons who at the outbreak of the Revolution took opposite sides. Lionel, my great-grandfather, remained a stanch Tory, Guilford joined the Continentals, and when last heard of, though a mere boy, was a captain in Washington’s army. Afterward he disappeared as completely as if the earth had swallowed him. Surely it cannot be that—”
“Many Revolutionary officers received land-grants in Kentucky for their services,” interrupted the school woman, “and those who entered into the isolation of the mountains were afterward lost to the world.”