ts of her strong self-will. To these little difficulties must be
added the difference of religion; and though neither of them cared two
pins for that, it was a matter for crossed daggers. A pound of feathers
weighs as much as (and in some poise more than) a pound of lead, and
the leaden-headed Squire and the feather-headed Madame swung always at
opposite ends of the beam, until it broke between them. Tales of rough
conflict, imprisonment, starvation, and even vile blows, were told about
them for several years; and then "Madame la Comtesse" (as her husband
disdainfully called her) disappeared, carrying off her one child, Caryl.
She was still of very comely face and form; and the Squire made known to
all whom it concerned, and many whom it did not concern, that his French
wife had run away with a young Frenchman, according to the habit of
her race and kind. In support of this charge he had nothing whatever to
show, and his friends disbelieved it, knowing him to be the last man in
the world to leave such a wrong unresented.

During the last three generations the fortunes of the Carnes had been
declining, slowly at first, and then faster and faster; and now they
fell with the final crash. The lady of high birth and great beauty had
brought nothing else into the family, but rather had impoverished it by
her settlement, and wild extravagance afterwards. Her husband Montagu
Carne staved off the evil day just for the present, by raising a large
sum upon second mortgage and the security of a trustful friend. But this
sum was dissipated, like the rest; for the Squire, being deeply wounded
by his wife's desertion, proved to the world his indifference about it
by plunging into still more reckless ways. He had none to succeed him;
for he vowed that the son of the adulteress--as he called her--should
never have Carne Castle; and his last mad act was to buy five-and-twenty
barrels of powder, wherewith to blow up his ancestral home. But ere he
could accomplish that stroke of business he stumbled and fell down the
old chapel steps, and was found the next morning by faithful Jeremiah,
as cold as the ivy which had caught his feet, and as dead as the stones
he would have sent to heaven.

No marvel that his son had no love for his memory, and little for the
land that gave him birth. In very early days this boy had shown that
his French blood was predominant. He would bite, and kick, and scratch,
instead of striking, as an English child does