The Silent Dead by Arthur Gask

I found my new family very much what Mrs. Arundel had said they would be, except that the old lady was rather eccentric and inclined to be very outspoken in her remarks. She told me at once she did not like my surname and that to outsiders I should always be referred to as Miss Polly and not Miss Wiggs. She told me, however, that she approved of my appearance which, she smiled, was a good thing as she could never bear to have people who looked plain or common about her. At seventy-five, she said I must excuse any little irritability she might show as she had a bad heart and it often troubled her.

Her son, Mr. Charles de Touraine was a handsome aristocratic-looking man with a Vandyke beard, and reminded me very much of the pictures I had seen of Charles the Second. An artist by profession, or rather I should say to occupy his time as he was well-off enough not to care whether he sold his paintings or not, he was a good-natured, easy-going man who never seemed to mind much what anyone else did. As with his mother, he suffered from a bad heart, in his case brought on by rheumatic fever in his youth.