rashed the baronet had been
Crumb, and the thrashing had been given on the score of a young woman
called Ruggles. So much was known at the hospital, and so much could
not be hidden by any lies which Sir Felix might tell. And when Sir
Felix swore that a policeman was holding him while Crumb was beating
him, no one believed him. In such cases the liar does not expect to be
believed. He knows that his disgrace will be made public, and only
hopes to be saved from the ignominy of declaring it with his own
words.

'What am I to do with him?' Lady Carbury said to her cousin. 'It is no
use telling me to leave him. I can't do that. I know he is bad. I know
that I have done much to make him what he is.' As she said this the
tears were running down her poor worn cheeks. 'But he is my child.
What am I to do with him now?'

This was a question which Roger found it almost impossible to answer.
If he had spoken his thoughts he would have declared that Sir Felix
had reached an age at which, if a man will go headlong to destruction,
he must go headlong to destruction. Thinking as he did of his cousin
he could see no possible salvation for him. 'Perhaps I should take him
abroad,' he said.

'Would he be better abroad than here?'

'He would have less opportunity for vice, and fewer means of running
you into debt.'

Lady Carbury, as she turned this counsel in her mind, thought of all
the hopes which she had indulged,--her literary aspirations, her
Tuesday evenings, her desire for society, her Brounes, her Alfs, and
her Bookers, her pleasant drawing-room, and the determination which
she had made that now in the afternoon of her days she would become
somebody in the world. Must she give it all up and retire to the
dreariness of some French town because it was no longer possible that
she should live in London with such a son as hers? There seemed to be
a cruelty in this beyond all cruelties that she had hitherto endured.
This was harder even than those lies which had been told of her when
almost in fear of her life she had run from her husband's house. But
yet she must do even this if in no other way she and her son could be
together. 'Yes,' she said, 'I suppose it would be so. I only wish that
I might die, so that were an end of it.'

'He might go out to one of the Colonies,' said Roger.

'Yes;--be sent away that he might kill himself with drink in
the bush, and so be got rid of. I have heard of that before.
Wherever he goes I shall