'They won't keep you long at the
Depot,' he said, 'for a man who can shoot straight, and ride to hounds,
is half a soldier already. God bless you, my lad. You'll do your duty
well, I know.'

There was silence in the room, and the noise of the storm outside, which
nobody had hitherto thought about, fell upon the ears of all four, as if
it had not been a familiar tone for hours, but as if it had but awakened
at that instant. They all stood listening, for by this time the girl
also had risen from her seat, and had made an indeterminate movement
forward towards the centre of the room. And out of the boom and thunder
of the storm there suddenly came a wild clatter of horses' feet, and a
heavy gate was heard to fall back upon its fastening. An instant later
there was a mad tugging at the front door bell, and an insaner clatter
at the knocker. Jervase himself rushed to answer this sudden and
unexpected summons, and opening the door unguardedly, was blown back
into the hall, from the walls of which every hanging picture and every
garment were swept by the incoming blast, like leaves. It sounded as if
the house were coming down.

A drenched, bareheaded figure staggered into the hall, wind-driven, and
would have fallen had not Jervase clutched at it. The newcomer and the
master of the house held on to each other, and Jervase panted hoarsely:

'You? What's the matter?' 'The matter?' said the new arrival. 'The
matter's ruin!'

CHAPTER II

The clatter of the tumbling objects in the hall brought out the General
and Jack Jervase's son. The girl peered with a whiter face than ever
from the parlour doorway, and a fourth auditor came upon the scene in
the person of an elderly woman in black satin and old lace, who rushed
into the hall with frightened eyes and upraised hands, in time to hear
the question and the answer.

To make clear what the question and the answer meant to the four people
who heard them, I must go back a step.

Jack Jervase ran away from home when the nineteenth century was in its
teens. He had left behind him a harum-scarum reputation, and, save for
his father and mother, but a solitary relative of his own name. When
he came back, with coin in pouch, and the story of a life of strange
adventure behind him, the old folks had been dead a dozen years, and the
solitary cousin, whom he had always derided as a pious sneak, had so
far prospered in the world's affairs that he had left the old-fashioned
convent