hind all there
smouldered the slow burning anger of the child who has looked into the
face of a deserted mother. Lady Caroom was white to the lips, and in
her eyes the horror of that story so pitilessly told seemed still to
linger.

Lord Arranmore spoke again. Still he sat back in his high-backed
chair, and still he spoke in measured, monotonous tones. But this time,
if only their ears had been quick enough to notice it, there lay behind
an emotion, held in check indeed, but every now and then quivering for
expression. He had turned to Lady Caroom.

"Chance," he said, "has brought together here at the moment when the
telling of these things has become a necessity, the two people who have
in a sense some right to hear them, for from each I have much to ask.
Sybil is your daughter, and from her there need be no secrets. So,
Catherine, I ask you again, now that you know everything, are you brave
enough to be my wife?"

She raised her eyes, and he saw the horror there. But he made no sign.
She rose and held out her hand for Sybil.

"Arranmore," she said, "I am afraid."

He looked down upon his plate.

"So let it be, then," he said. "It would need a brave woman indeed to
join her lot with mine after the things which I have told you. At
heart, Catherine, I am almost a dead man. Believe me, you are wise."

He rose, and the two women passed from the room. Then he resumed his
former seat, and attitude, and Brooks, though he tried to speak, felt
his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth, a dry and nerveless thing.

For in these doings there was tragedy.

"There remains to me you, Philip Kingston, my son," Lord Arranmore said,
in the same measured tone. "You also have before you the story of my
life, you are able from it to form some sort of idea as to what my
future is likely to be. I do not wish to deceive you. My early
enthusiasms are extinct. I look upon the ten or twenty years or so
which may be left to me of life as merely a space of time to be filled
with as many amusements and new sensations as may be procurable without
undue effort. I have no wish to convert, or perhaps pervert you, to my
way of thinking. You live still in Utopia, and to me Utopia does not
exist. So make your choice deliberately. Do you care to come to me?"

Then Brooks found words of a sort.

"Lord Arranmore," he said, "forgive me if what I must say sounds
undutiful. I know that you have suffered. I can realize something of
what you have b