s seems to know something about them. Do you think he could be
trusted to choose one for me?"

"Perfectly."

Aymer's tone was completely impartial, and Peter ruminated over his
next remark a moment.

"You still mean him to stick to his Road Engineering?"

"He is perfectly free to do as he likes."

Charles Aston put in a word.

"He is twenty-two now, and he knows his own mind a good deal better
than most boys of that age. He seems bent on carrying out his Road
scheme, and there seems no reason why he should not." He pushed over a
box of cigars to his visitor.

"No, exactly. No reason at all." Peter selected a cigar carefully. "I
expect you find it very interesting watching how he turns out, don't
you, Aymer?"

"It is not uninteresting."

"You've not seen Nevil yet," suggested Mr. Aston. "He is just out of a
spell of work; come out in the garden and find him while you smoke."

"Well, perhaps we might, if you don't mind being left, Aymer?" Peter's
voice was full of kindly interest. To him the great catastrophe was
ever a new and awful thing, and Aymer an invalid to be considered and
treated with such attention as he knew how.

"Not in the least," said Aymer politely, marvelling how exactly his
father had gauged the limits of his endurance. When the heavy
curtained door had shut out voices and footsteps and only the
stillness of the room was with him the forced passivity slipped from
Aymer like a mask, and his was again the face of a fighter, of one
still fighting against fearful odds.

He lay with clenched hands and rigid face, and great beads of
perspiration stood on his forehead, for that passive indifference
towards what had become a matter of life and death to him was the
fruit of a victory that had to be won again and again each time his
perilous position was assailed by the appearance of Peter Masters.

His very existence had become so bound up in the life of the boy he
had taken as his own that the smallest fraying of the cord which bound
them together was a thought of new pain. The passionate, fiercely
jealous nature that had lain dormant so long had gathered strength
from silence and clamoured with imperious insistence on its right, to
love, to whole allegiance, to undisputed sway over Christopher.

What right could this man, Christopher's father though he were, in the
flesh, show beside his, Aymer Aston's? Every instinct rose in
indignant rebellion against the fiat of his own conscience.

For