"We have it," he answered hesitatingly, "but--it isn't here at present--I
can't find it. I suppose," he blurted out with an effort, "that Alice has
got it. Mrs. Oke sometimes has the fancy of having some of these old things
down. I suppose she takes ideas from them."
A sudden light dawned in my mind. The white dress in which I had seen Mrs.
Oke in the yellow room, the day that she showed me Lovelock's verses, was
not, as I had thought, a modern copy; it was the original dress of Alice
Oke, the daughter of Virgil Pomfret--the dress in which, perhaps,
Christopher Lovelock had seen her in that very room.
The idea gave me a delightful picturesque shudder. I said nothing. But I
pictured to myself Mrs. Oke sitting in that yellow room--that room which no
Oke of Okehurst save herself ventured to remain in alone, in the dress of
her ancestress, confronting, as it were, that vague, haunting something
that seemed to fill the place--that vague presence, it seemed to me, of the
murdered cavalier poet.
Mrs. Oke, as I have said, was extremely silent, as a result of being
extremely indifferent. She really did not care in the least about anything
except her own ideas and day-dreams, except when, every now and then, she
was seized with a sudden desire to shock the prejudices or superstitions of
her husband.
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