poison not known in Europe at that time
except to _savants_, and first mentioned by Acosta some months before.
An attendant was accused and tried, but acquitted. The then son of the
House was a Fellow of the newly-founded Royal Society, and author of a
now-forgotten work on Toxicology, which, however, I have read. No
suspicion, of course, fell on _him_.'

As Zaleski proceeded with this retrospect, I could not but ask myself
with stirrings of the most genuine wonder, whether he could possess
this intimate knowledge of _all_ the great families of Europe! It was
as if he had spent a part of his life in making special study of the
history of the Orvens.

'In the same manner,' he went on, 'I could detail the annals of the
family from that time to the present. But all through they have been
marked by the same latent tragic elements; and I have said enough to
show you that in each of the tragedies there was invariably something
large, leering, something of which the mind demands explanation, but
seeks in vain to find it. Now we need no longer seek. Destiny did not
design that the last Lord of Orven should any more hide from the world
the guilty secret of his race. It was the will of the gods--and he
betrayed himself. "Return," he writes, "the beginning of the end is
come." What end?

_The_ end--perfectly well known to Randolph, needing no explanation for
_him_. The old, old end, which in the ancient dim time led the first
lord, loyal still at heart, to forsake his king; and another, still
devout, to renounce his cherished faith, and yet another to set fire to
the home of his ancestors. You have called the two last scions of the
family "a proud and selfish pair of beings"; proud they were, and
selfish too, but you are in error if you think their selfishness a
personal one: on the contrary, they were singularly oblivious of self
in the ordinary sense of the word. Theirs was the pride and the
selfishness of _race_. What consideration, think you, other than the
weal of his house, could induce Lord Randolph to take on himself the
shame--for as such he certainly regards it--of a conversion to
radicalism? He would, I am convinced, have _died_ rather than make this
pretence for merely personal ends. But he does it--and the reason? It
is because he has received that awful summons from home; because "the
end" is daily coming nearer, and it must not find him unprepared to
meet it; it is because Lord Pharanx's senses are becoming _too