freak of his nerves which made him smile when she had gone.

Even then he left his tea for a long time, cooling and untasted,
while he sat lethargically lolling back, and regarding from time to
time the pencilled profile with his sad eyes.

CHAPTER II

The period of Lightmark's boyhood had not been an altogether happy
one. His earliest recollections carried him back to a time when he
lived a wandering, desolate life with his father and mother, in an
endless series of Continental hotels and _pensions_. He was prepared
to assert, with confidence, that his mother had been a very
beautiful person, who carried an air of the most abundant affection
for him on the numerous occasions when she received her friends. Of
his father, who had, as far as possible, ignored his existence, he
remembered very little.

During these years there had been frequent difficulties, the nature
of which he had since learned entirely to comprehend; controversies
with white-waistcoated proprietors of hotels and voluble
tradespeople, generally followed by a severance of hastily-cemented
friendships, and a departure of apparently unpremeditated
abruptness.

When his mother died, he was sent to a fairly good school in
England, where his father occasionally visited him, and where he had
been terribly bullied at first, and had afterwards learned to bully
in turn. He spent his holidays in London, at the house of his
grandmother--an excellent old lady, who petted and scolded him
almost simultaneously, who talked mysteriously about his "poor dear
father," and took care that he went to church regularly, and had
dancing-lessons three times a week.

His father's death, which occurred at Monaco somewhat unexpectedly,
and on the subject of which his grandmother maintained a certain
reserve, affected the boy but little; in fact, the first real grief
which he could remember to have experienced was when the old lady
herself died--he was then nineteen years old--leaving him her
blessing and a sum of Consols sufficient to produce an income of
about L250 a year.

The boy's inclinations leaned in the direction of Oxford, and in
this he was supported by his only-surviving relative, his uncle,
Colonel Lightmark, a loud-voiced cavalry officer, who had been the
terror of Richard's juvenile existence, and who, as executor of the
old lady's will, was fully aware of the position in which her death
had left him, and her desire that he should go into the Church.