er
taking up music, a study which, being no musician, he was unable to
regard as in any sense intellectual. He supported his view by frequent
allusions to the brainlessness of song-birds; in fact, he had been
always a little bitter on the subject, having before his eyes the
flagrant instance of his son Frederick.

Frederick was no scholar. He despised his forefathers as a race of
pedants, and boasted that he never opened a book, barring the book of
life, in which he flattered himself he could have stood a very stiff
examination. He used a certain unbowdlerized edition which he was
careful to conceal from the ladies of his family. Before he was forty
Frederick had fiddled away the family tradition, and not only the
family tradition, but the family splendour and the family credit. When
Lucia at seventeen was studying the classics under Horace Jewdwine,
Frederick's debts came rolling in; at about the same period old Sir
Joseph's health showed signs of failing, and Frederick took to raising
money on his expectations. He had just five years to do it in.

It was then that Lucia first began to notice a change in her
grandfather's manner towards her. Sometimes she would catch his eyes
fixed on her with a curious, scrutinizing gaze, and once or twice she
thought she detected in them a profound sadness. Whenever at these
moments they happened to meet her eyes they were immediately averted.
Sir Joseph had not been given to betraying emotion, save only on
points of scholarship, and it was evident that he had something on his
mind.

What he had on his mind was the thought that at the rate Frederick was
living he might at any moment cease to live, and then what would
become of Lucia? And what would become of the Harden Library? What of
the family tradition? By much pondering on the consequences of
Frederick's decease Sir Joseph had considerably hastened his own.
Lucia knew nothing of all this. She was only aware that her
grandfather had sent for Horace Jewdwine on his death-bed. What had
passed between them remained known only to Horace. But part of a sum
of money left by Sir Joseph's will towards the founding of a Harden
scholarship was transferred by a codicil to Lucia for her education.

The task begun by Horace Jewdwine was continued by a learned lady,
Miss Sophia Roots, B.A.; and Miss Roots did her work so well that when
Sir Frederick assumed his rightful guardianship of his daughter he
pronounced her the worst educated you