ft, Wykham Delandre and his sister
Margaret. The man and woman seemed to have inherited in masculine and
feminine form respectively the evil tendency of their race, sharing in
common the principles, though manifesting them in different ways, of
sullen passion, voluptuousness and recklessness.

The history of the Brents had been something similar, but showing the
causes of decadence in their aristocratic and not their plebeian
forms. They, too, had sent their shoots to the wars; but their
positions had been different and they had often attained honour--for
without flaw they were gallant, and brave deeds were done by them
before the selfish dissipation which marked them had sapped their
vigour.

The present head of the family--if family it could now be called when
one remained of the direct line--was Geoffrey Brent. He was almost a
type of worn out race, manifesting in some ways its most brilliant
qualities, and in others its utter degradation. He might be fairly
compared with some of those antique Italian nobles whom the painters
have preserved to us with their courage, their unscrupulousness, their
refinement of lust and cruelty--the voluptuary actual with the fiend
potential. He was certainly handsome, with that dark, aquiline,
commanding beauty which women so generally recognise as dominant. With
men he was distant and cold; but such a bearing never deters
womankind. The inscrutable laws of sex have so arranged that even a
timid woman is not afraid of a fierce and haughty man. And so it was
that there was hardly a woman of any kind or degree, who lived within
view of Brent's Rock, who did not cherish some form of secret
admiration for the handsome wastrel. The category was a wide one, for
Brent's Rock rose up steeply from the midst of a level region and for
a circuit of a hundred miles it lay on the horizon, with its high old
towers and steep roofs cutting the level edge of wood and hamlet, and
far-scattered mansions.

So long as Geoffrey Brent confined his dissipations to London and
Paris and Vienna--anywhere out of sight and sound of his home--opinion
was silent. It is easy to listen to far off echoes unmoved, and we can
treat them with disbelief, or scorn, or disdain, or whatever attitude
of coldness may suit our purpose. But when the scandal came close home
it was another matter; and the feelings of independence and integrity
which is in people of every community which is not utterly spoiled,
asserted itself a