rother from London to
disclose his future plans. The brothers had not met for many years, but
Austin was quick to obey when he learnt that a fortune and a title were at
stake. The sister and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Pendleton, had reached
Cornwall two days before the funeral. They were to take Sisily back to
London with them. It was Robert Turold's intention to part with his
daughter and place her in his sister's charge. For a reason he had not yet
divulged, Sisily was to have no place in his brilliant future. He disliked
his daughter. Her sex was a fatal bar to his regard. He had heaped so many
reproaches on her mother for bringing another girl into the world that the
poor woman had descended to the grave with a confused idea that she was to
blame.

Sisily had a strange nature, reticent, yet tender. She had loved her
mother passionately, and feared and hated her father because he had
treated his wife so harshly. She had been the witness of it all--from her
earliest childhood to the moment when the unhappy woman had died with her
eyes fixed on her husband's implacable face, but holding fast to her
daughter's hand, as though she wanted to carry the pressure of those
loving fingers into the grave.

A clock on the mantel-piece ticked loudly. But it was the only sound which
disturbed the quietness of the room. The representatives of the family
eyed one another with guarded indifference. Circumstances had kept them
apart for many years, and they now met almost as strangers.

Mrs. Pendleton sat on a sofa with her husband. She was a notable outline
of a woman, large and massive, with a shrewd capable face and a
middle-class mind. She lived, when at home, in the rarefied atmosphere of
Golders Green, in a red house with a red-tiled roof, one of a streetful
similarly afflicted, where she kept two maids and had a weekly reception
day. She was childless, but she disdained to carry a pet dog as
compensation for barrenness. Her husband was a meagre shrimp of a
stockbroker under his wife's control, who golfed on Sundays and played
auction bridge at his club twice a week with cyclic regularity. He and his
wife had little in common except the habit of living together, which had
made them acquainted with each other's ways.

Mrs. Pendleton had not seen either of her brothers for a long time. Robert
had been too engrossed in digging into the past for the skeletons of his
ancestors to do more than write intermittent letters to the livin