roved to us. In its
way it had been a make-believe rancor, a rancor on principle, for he had
been made to see that unless he was inflamed by it, he was not worthy
to be his mother's son. Tonight had changed all this. No longer was his
grievance sentimental, theoretical or abstract. It was suddenly become
real and very bitter. It was no longer a question of the wrong done his
mother thirty years ago; it became the question of a wrong done himself
in casting him nameless upon the world, a thing of scorn to cruel,
unjust humanity. Could Mistress Winthrop have guessed the bitter
self-derision with which he had, in apparent levity, offered her his
name, she might have felt some pity for him who had no pity for himself.

And so, to-night he felt--as once for a moment Everard had made him
feel--that he had a very real wrong of his own to avenge upon his
father; and the task before him lost much of the repugnance that it had
held for him hitherto.

All this because four hours ago he had looked into the brown depths of
Mistress Winthrop's eyes. He sighed, and declaimed a line of Congreve's:

"'Woman is a fair image in a pool; who leaps at it is sunk.'"

The landlord came to bid him in to supper. He excused himself. Sent his
lordship word that he was over-tired, and went off to bed.

They met at breakfast, at an early hour upon the morrow, Mistress
Winthrop cool and distant; his lordship grumpy and mute; Mr. Caryll
airy and talkative as was his habit. They set out soon afterwards. But
matters were nowise improved. His lordship dozed in a corner of the
carriage, while Mistress Winthrop found more interest in the flowering
hedgerows than in Mr. Caryll, ignored him when he talked, and did not
answer him when he set questions; till, in the end, he, too, lapsed into
silence, and as a solatium for his soreness assured himself by lengthy,
wordless arguments that matters were best so.

They entered the outlying parts of London some two hours later, and it
still wanted an hour or so to noon when the chaise brought up inside the
railings before the earl's house in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

There came a rush of footmen, a bustle of service, amid which they
alighted and entered the splendid residence that was part of the little
that remained Lord Ostermore from the wreck his fortunes had suffered on
the shoals of the South Sea.

Mr. Caryll paused a moment to dismiss Leduc to the address in Old Palace
Yard where he had hired a lodging. T