ch
resembled, on a solider, more substantial scale, as the most indulgent
of fathers, the princeliest of hosts, the best of shots and riders,
chief indeed of the Falloden clan and all its glories, who, like other
monarchs, could do no wrong.

But now the glamour which must always attend the central figure of such
a scene withered at the touch of poverty and misfortune. And, in its
absence, Douglas found himself dealing with an enthusiastic, vain,
self-confident being, who had ruined himself and his son by
speculations, often so childishly foolish that Douglas could not think
of them without rage. Intellectually, he could only despise and condemn
his father.

Yet the old bond held. Till he met Constance Bledlow, he had cared only
for his own people, and among them, preeminently, for his father. In
this feeling, family pride and natural affection met together. The
family pride had been sorely shaken, the affection, steeped in a
painful, astonished pity, remained. For the first time in his life
Douglas had been sleeping badly. Interminable dreams pursued him, in
which the scene in Marmion quad, his last walk with Constance along the
Cherwell, and the family crash, were all intermingled, with the fatuity
natural to dreams. And his wakings from them were almost equally haunted
by the figures of Constance and Radowitz, and by a miserable yearning
over his father, which no one who saw his hard, indifferent bearing
during the day could possible have guessed. "Poor--poor old fellow!"--he
had once or twice raised himself from his bed in the early morning, as
though answering this cry in his ears, only to find that he himself had
uttered it.

He had told his people nothing of Constance Bledlow beyond the bare fact
of his acquaintance with her, first at Cannes, and then at Oxford. And
they knew nothing of the Radowitz incident. Very few people indeed were
aware of the true history of that night which had marred an artist's
life. The college authorities had been painfully stirred by the reports
which had reached them; but Radowitz himself had written to the Head
maintaining that the whole thing was an accident and a frolic, and
insisting that no public or official notice should be taken of it, a
fact which had not prevented the Head from writing severely to Falloden,
Meyrick, and Robertson, or the fellows of the college from holding a
college meeting, even in the long vacation, to discuss what measures
should be taken in the Oct