accepted him--but that some information came to my
knowledge. Then, later on, largely I think to punish me, he nearly
succeeded in entangling my younger sister--your Aunt Edith. I stood in
his way. He hates me, of course. I think he suffered. In those days he
was very different. But his pride and self-will were always a madness.
And gradually they have devoured everything else." She paused. "I cannot
tell you anything more, Harry. There were other people concerned."

"Dearest, as if I should ask! He did my mother no injury?"

Under the shadow of the woods the young man threw his arm round her
shoulders, looking down upon her with a proud tenderness.

"None. I escaped; and I won all along the line. I was neither to be
pitied--nor he," she added slowly, "though I daresay he would put down
his later mode of life to me."

"As if any woman could ever have put up with him!"

Lady Tatham's expression showed a mind drawn back into the past.

"When I first saw him, he was a magnificent creature. For several years I
was dazzled by him. Then when I--and others--broke with him, he turned
his back on England and went to live abroad. And gradually he quarrelled
with everybody who had ever known him."

"But you never did care about him, mother?" cried Tatham, outraged by the
mere notion of any such thing.

"No--never." There was a deliberate emphasis on the words. The smile that
followed was slight but poignant. "I knew that still more plainly, when,
six months after I ceased to see him, your father came along."

Tatham who had drawn her hand within his arm, laid his own upon it for a
moment. He was in the happy position of a son in whom filial affection
represented no enforced piety, but the spontaneous instinct of his
nature. His mother had been so far his best friend; and though he rarely
spoke of his father his childish recollections of him, and the impression
left by his mother's constant and deliberate talk of him, during the
boyish years of her son, had entered deep into the bases of character. It
is on such feelings and traditions that all that is best in our still
feudal English life is reared; Tatham had known them without stint; and
in their absence he would have been merely the trivially prosperous young
man that he no doubt appeared to the Radical orators of the
neighbourhood.

The wood thinned. They emerged from it to see the Helvellyn range lying
purple under a southwest sky, and Tatham's gray mare waiting a