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—I should never have imagined that you chewed."

"I don't," said Carmichael, and would answer no more questions on the subject. Nor had Reeves any opportunity to press the point, for Marryatt came in soon afterwards, and sat down at their table. "Is it true?" asked Carmichael, "that Brotherhood is the first member of the club to be buried here?"

"He is. There was Parry, of course, who died here, but he was buried in London. It must be strange for these Oatviles, who have had all the expensive funerals to themselves for the last two hundred years, to make room for an old fellow like that."

"Two hundred? Why not three hundred?" asked Reeves.

"Well, the Oatviles were Catholics, you know, up to James II's time. People say that the room we use as the billiard-room now used to be the chapel at one time. And the Oatviles don't seem to have been buried here till the time of Queen Anne."

"Really, Marryatt?" said Carmichael. "That is most interesting. They must have died abroad, I fancy, for of course Protestant burial was the only kind legal in England. Did it ever occur to you how little early Renaissance architecture you find in English villages? It's an odd testimony, I think, to the vitality of Catholicism. Puritanism must have had something to do with it, of course, but