well before the not altogether unexpected
crisis in his affairs. Very different was the feeling he had bestowed
on that son of his "under the rose." The boy, who had always gone by his
mother's name of Larne, had on her death been sent to some relations of
hers in Ireland, and there brought up. He had been called to the Dublin
bar, and married, young, a girl half Cornish and half Irish; presently,
having cost old Heythorp in all a pretty penny, he had died impecunious,
leaving his fair Rosamund at thirty with a girl of eight and a boy of
five. She had not spent six months of widowhood before coming over from
Dublin to claim the old man's guardianship. A remarkably pretty woman,
like a full-blown rose, with greenish hazel eyes, she had turned up one
morning at the offices of "The Island Navigation Company," accompanied
by her two children--for he had never divulged to them his private
address. And since then they had always been more or less on his hands,
occupying a small house in a suburb of Liverpool. He visited them there,
but never asked them to the house in Sefton Park, which was in fact his
daughter's; so that his proper family and friends were unaware of their
existence.

Rosamund Larne was one of those precarious ladies who make uncertain
incomes by writing full-bodied storyettes. In the most dismal
circumstances she enjoyed a buoyancy bordering on the indecent; which
always amused old Heythorp's cynicism. But of his grandchildren Phyllis
and Jock (wild as colts) he had become fond. And this chance of getting
six thousand pounds settled on them at a stroke had seemed to him
nothing but heaven-sent. As things were, if he "went off"--and, of
course, he might at any moment, there wouldn't be a penny for them; for
he would "cut up" a good fifteen thousand to the bad. He was now giving
them some three hundred a year out of his fees; and dead directors
unfortunately earned no fees! Six thousand pounds at four and a half per
cent., settled so that their mother couldn't "blue it," would give them
a certain two hundred and fifty pounds a year-better than beggary. And
the more he thought the better he liked it, if only that shaky chap, Joe
Pillin, didn't shy off when he'd bitten his nails short over it!

Four evenings later, the "shaky chap" had again appeared at his house in
Sefton Park.

"I've thought it over, Sylvanus. I don't like it.

"No; but you'll do it."

"It's a sacrifice. Fifty-four thousand for four ships