HALF A MILLION OF MONEY.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "BARBARA'S HISTORY."

CHAPTER XLVII.  A PAGE OF FAMILY HISTORY.

EVERY student of English history is familiar
with the noble and ancient name of Holme-
Pierrepoint. A more stately race of men and
women than the bearers of that name never
traversed the pages of mediæval chronicle.
Their famous ancestor, Thierry de Pierrepoint,
"came over," as the phrase is, with William
the Bastard; but he was only the younger son
of a younger son, and the houses which look
back to him as their founder are, after all, but
offshoots from that still more ancient line that
held lands and titles in Franche Comté, three
centuries before the great conquest.

How Thierry de Pierrepoint came to be lord
of many a fair and fertile English manor; how
his descendants multiplied and prospered, held
high offices of state under more than thirty
sovereigns, raised up for themselves great names
in camp and council, and intermarried with the
bravest and fairest of almost every noble family
in the land, needs no recapitulation here.
Enough that the Holme-Pierrepoints were an
elder branch of the original Pierrepoint stock;
and that Lady Castletowers, whose father was
a Holme-Pierrepoint, and whose mother was a
Talbot, had really some excuse for that
inordinate pride of birth which underlaid every
thought and act of her life as the ground-colour
underlies all the tints of a painting.

The circumstances of her ladyship's parentage
were these.

George Condé Holme-Pierrepoint, third Lord
Holmes, of Holme Castle, Lancashire, being no
longer young, and having, moreover, encumbered
a slender estate with many mortgages,
married at fifty years of age, to the infinite
annoyance of his cousin and heir-presumptive,
Captain Holme-Pierrepoint of Sowerby. The
lady of Lord Holmes' choice was just half his
age. She was known in Portsmouth and its
neighbourhood as "the beautiful Miss Talbot;"
she was the fifth of nine daughters in a family
of fourteen children; and her father, the
Honourable Charles Talbot, held the rank of
Rear-Admiral in the Royal Navy. It is, perhaps,
almost unnecessary to add that Miss
Talbot had no fortune.

This marriage was celebrated some time in
the summer of 1810; and in the month of
October, 1811, after little more than one year
of marriage, Lady Holmes died, leaving an
infant daughter named Alethea Claude. Well-
nigh broken-hearted, the widower shut himself
up in Holme Castle, and led a life of profound
seclusion. He received no visitors; he absented
himself from his parliamentary duties, and he
was rarely seen beyond his own park gates.
Then fantastic stories began to be told of his
temper and habits. It was said that he gave
way to sudden and unprovoked paroxysms of
rage; that he had equally strange fits of silence;
that he abhorred the light of day, and sat
habitually with closed shutters and lighted
candles; that he occasionally did not go to bed
for eight-and-forty hours at a time; and a
hundred other tales, equally bizarre and improbable.
At length, when the world had almost forgotten
him, and his little girl was between four and
five years of age, Lord Holmes astounded his
neighbours, and more than astounded his heir,
by marrying his daughter's governess.

How he came to take this step, whether he
married the governess for her own sake, or for
the child's sake, or to gratify a passing caprice,
were facts known only to himself. That he
did marry her, and that, having married her, he
continued to live precisely the same eccentric,
sullen life as before, was all that even his own
servants could tell about the matter. The
second Lady Holmes visited nowhere, and was
visited by none. What she had been as Miss
Holme-Pierrepoint's governess, she continued
to be as Miss Holme-Pierrepoint's stepmother.
She claimed no authority. She called her
husband "my lord," stood in awe of her servants,
and yielded to the child's imperious temper just
as she had done at the first. The result was,
that she remained a cypher in her own house,
and was treated as a cypher. When, by-
and-by, she also gave birth to a little daughter,
there were no rejoicings; and when, some few
years later, she died, and was laid beside her
high-born predecessor, there were no lamentations.
Had she brought an heir to the house,
or had she filled her place in it more bravely,
things, perchance, had gone differently. But
the world is terribly apt to take people at their
own valuation;  and Lady Holmes, perplexed

              "—— with the burden of an honour
          Unto which she was not born,"

had rated herself according to the dictates of