of women she is. What
then?"

"Nothing, my dear young sir,--nothing, except that Mr. Darrell never
forgave it. He has his prejudices: this marriage shocked one of them."

"Prejudice against my poor mother! I always supposed so! I wonder why?
The most simple-hearted, inoffensive, affectionate woman."

"I have not a doubt of it; but it is beginning to rain. Let us go home.
I should like some luncheon: it breaks the day."

"Tell me first why Mr. Darrell has a prejudice against my mother. I
don't think that he has even seen her. Unaccountable caprice! Shocked
him, too,--what a word! Tell me--I beg--I insist."

"But you know," said Fairthorn, half piteously, half snappishly, "that
Mrs. Haughton was the daughter of a linendraper, and her father's money
got Charlie out of the county jail; and Mr. Darrell said, 'Sold even
your name!' My father heard him say it in the hall at Fawley. Mr.
Darrell was there during a long vacation, and your father came to see
him. Your father fired up, and they never saw each other, I believe,
again."

Lionel remained still as if thunder-stricken. Something in his mother's
language and manner had at times made him suspect that she was not so
well born as his father. But it was not the discovery that she was a
tradesman's daughter that galled him; it was the thought that his father
was bought for the altar out of the county jail! It was those cutting
words, "Sold even your name." His face, before very crimson, became
livid; his head sank on his breast. He walked towards the old gloomy
house by Fairthorn's side, as one who, for the first time in life, feels
on his heart the leaden weight of an hereditary shame.

CHAPTER VI.

Showing how sinful it is in a man who does not care for his honour
to beget children.

When Lionel saw Mr. Fairthorn devoting his intellectual being to the
contents of a cold chicken-pie, he silently stepped out of the room and
slunk away into a thick copse at the farthest end of the paddock. He
longed to be alone. The rain descended, not heavily, but in penetrating
drizzle; he did not feel it, or rather he felt glad that there was no
gaudy mocking sunlight. He sat down forlorn in the hollows of a glen
which the copse covered, and buried his face in his clasped hands.

Lionel Haughton, as the reader may have noticed, was no premature
man,--a manly boy, but still a habitant of the twilight, dreamy,
shadow-land of boyhood. Noble elements were stirring fitful