But long before they thought me convalescent I was conscious, lying awake and plotting my escape. With cunning I managed it. Of my wife and child I never once thought. Every trace of human affection seemed withered up in my heart. I took the money subscribed for me with a hypocrite's smile, and I slunk away from England. I went to Montreal in Canada, and I deliberately entered upon a life of low pleasures. Pardon me!"

He bent forward and with a steady hand readjusted the shade of a lamp which was in danger of burning. Lady Caroom leaned back in her chair with an indrawn sobbing breath. The action at such a moment seemed grotesque. His own coolness, whilst with steady fingers he probed away amongst the wounded places of his life, was in itself gruesome.

"My money," he continued, "was no large sum, but I eked it out with gambling. The luck was always on my side. It's quite true that I ruined the father of the young lady who paid me a visit to-day. After a somewhat chequered career he was settling down in a merchant's office in Montreal when I met him. His luck at cards was as bad as mine was good.

I won all he had, and more. I believe that he committed suicide. A man there was kind to me, asked me to his house--I persuaded his wife to run away with me. These are amongst the slightest of my delinquencies. I steeped myself in sin. I revelled in it. I seemed to myself in some way to be showing my defiance for the hidden powers of life which I had cursed. I played a match with evil by day and by night until I was glutted. And then I stole away from the city, leaving behind a hideous reputation and not a single friend. Then a new mood came to me. I wanted to get to a place where I should see no human beings at all, and escape in that way from the memories which were still like a clot upon my brain. So I set my face westwards. I travelled till at last civilization lay behind. Still I pushed onward. I had stores in plenty, an Indian servant who chanced to be faithful, and whom I saw but twice a day. At last I reached Lake Ono. Here between us we built a hut. I sent my Indian away then, and when he fawned at my feet to stay I kicked him. This was my third phase of living, and it was true that some measure of sanity came back to me. Oh, the blessed relief of seeing the face of neither man nor woman. It was the unpeopled world of Nature--uncorrupted, fresh, magnificent, alive by day and by night with everlasting music of Nature. The solitudes of those great forests were like a wonderful balm. So the fevers were purged out of me, and I became once more an ordinary human being. I was content, I think, to die there, for I had plenty to eat and drink, and the animals and birds who came to me morning and evening kept me from even the thought of loneliness. The rest is obvious. I lost two cousins in South Africa, an uncle in the hunting-field. A man in Montreal had recognized me. I was discovered. But before I returned I killed Brooks, the police-court missionary. This girl has forced me to bring him to life again."

It was a strange silence which followed. Brooks sat back in his chair, pale, bewildered, striving to focus this story properly, to attain a proper comprehension of these new strange things. And behind all there smouldered the slow burning anger of the child who has looked into the face of a deserted mother. Lady Caroom was white to the lips, and in her eyes the horror of that story so pitilessly told seemed still to linger.

Lord Arranmore spoke again. Still he sat back in his high-backed chair, and still he spoke in measured, monotonous tones. But this time, if only their ears had been quick enough to notice it, there lay behind an emotion, held in check indeed, but every now and then quivering for expression. He had turned to Lady Caroom.

"Chance," he said, "has brought together here at the moment when the telling of these things has become a necessity, the two people who have in a sense some right to hear them, for from each I have much to ask.

Sybil is your daughter, and from her there need be no secrets. So, Catherine, I ask you again, now that you know everything, are you brave enough to be my wife?"

She raised her eyes, and he saw the horror there. But he made no sign.

She rose and held out her hand for Sybil.

"Arranmore," she said, "I am afraid."

He looked down upon his plate.

"So let it be, then," he said. "It would need a brave woman indeed to join her lot with mine after the things which I have told you. At heart, Catherine, I am almost a dead man. Believe me, you are wise."

He rose, and the two women passed from the room. Then he resumed his former seat, and attitude, and Brooks, though he tried to speak, felt his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth, a dry and nerveless thing.

For in these doings there was tragedy.

"There remains to me you, Philip Kingston, my son," Lord Arranmore said, in the same measured tone. "You also have before you the story of my life, you are able from it to form some sort of idea as to what my future is likely to be. I do not wish to deceive you. My early enthusiasms are extinct. I look upon the ten or twenty years or so which may be left to me of life as merely a space of time to be filled with as many amusements and new sensations as may be procurable without undue effort. I have no wish to convert, or perhaps pervert you, to my way of thinking. You live still in Utopia, and to me Utopia does not exist. So make your choice deliberately. Do you care to come to me?"

Then Brooks found words of a sort.

"Lord Arranmore," he said, "forgive me if what I must say sounds undutiful. I know that you have suffered. I can realize something of what you have been through. But your desertion of my mother and me was a brutality. What you call your creed of life sounds to me hideous.

You and I are far apart, and so far as I am concerned, God grant that we may remain so."

For the first time Lord Arranmore smiled. He poured out with steady hand yet another glass of wine, and he nodded towards the door.

"I am obliged to you," he said, "for your candour. I have met with enough hypocrisy in life to be able to appreciate it. Be so good as to humour my whim--and to leave me alone."

Brooks rose from his seat, hesitated for a single moment, and left the room. Lord Arranmore leaned back in his high-backed chair and looked round at the empty places. The cigarette burned out between his fingers, his wine remained untasted. The evening's entertainment was over.

PART II

CHAPTER I

LORD ARRANMORE'S AMUSEMENTS

"The domestic virtues," Lord Arranmore said softly to himself, "being denied to me, the question remains how to pass one's time."

He rose wearily from his seat, and walking to the window looked out upon St. James's Square. A soft rain hung about the lamp-posts, the pavements were thick with umbrellas. He returned to his chair with a shrug of the shoulders.

"The only elucidation from outside seems to be a change of climate," he mused. "I should prefer to think of something more original. In the meantime I will write to that misguided young man in Medchester."

He drew paper and pen towards him and began to write. Even his handwriting seemed a part of the man--cold, shapely, and deliberate.

"My DEAR BROOKS,

"I have been made acquainted through Mr. Ascough with your desire to leave the new firm of Morrison and Brooks, and while I congratulate you very much upon the fact itself, I regret equally the course of reasoning which I presume led to your decision. You will probably have heard from Mr. Ascough by this time on a matter of business. You are, by birth, Lord Kingston of Ross, and the possessor of the Kingston income, which amounts to a little over two thousand a year. Please remember that this comes to you not through any grace or favour of mine, but by your own unalienable right as the eldest son of the Marquis of Arranmore.

I cannot give it to you. I cannot withhold it from you. If you refuse to take it the amount must accumulate for your heirs, or in due time find its way to the Crown. Leave the tithe alone by all means, if you like, but do not carry quixotism to the borders of insanity by declining to spend your own money, and thereby cramp your life.

"I trust to hear from Mr. Ascough of your more reasonable frame of mind, and while personally I agree with you that we are better apart, you can always rely upon me if I can be of any service to you.

"Yours sincerely,

"ARRANMORE."

He read the letter through thoughtfully and folded it up.

"I really don't see what the young fool can kick about in that," he said, throwing it into the basket. "Well, Hennibul, how are you?"

Mr. Hennibul, duly ushered in by a sedate butler, pronounced himself both in words and appearance fit and well. He took a chair and a cigarette, and looked about him approvingly.

"Nice house, yours, Arranmore. Nice old-fashioned situation, too. Why don't you entertain?"

"No friends, no inclination, no womankind!"

Mr. Hennibul smiled incredulously.

"Your card plate is chock-full," he said, "and there are a dozen women in town at least of your connections who'd do the polite things by you.

As to inclination--well, one must do something."

"That's about the most sensible thing you have said, Hennibul,"

Arranmore remarked. "I've just evoked the same fact out of my own consciousness. One must do something. It's tiresome, but it's quite true." Politics?

"Hate 'em! Not worth while anyway."

"Travel."

"Done all I want for a bit, but I keep that in reserve.

"Hunt."

"Bad leg, but I do a bit at it."

"Society."

"Sooner go on the County Council."