before his deep love was awake to confuse his judgment he had
declared that if he might only be permitted to bring Elizabeth
Masters's son through the perilous passage of boyhood, he would never
stand between Christopher and what, after all, was his right due, and
in the eyes of the world, his wonderful fortune. Elizabeth of the
brave heart and uncompromising creed had thought otherwise of this
fortune, as did Charles Aston and Aymer himself. The first had
imperilled her beloved child's bodily welfare to save him from what
she thought an evil thing, and the Astons, father and son, had bid
defiance to their hitherto straightforward policy and followed
expediency instead of open dealing, but there Aymer stopped.

The decision he had made must be adhered to at all costs. It mattered
nothing he had not been in a position to count the cost ten years ago.
He at least could not discount his own word. If Fate drew Christopher
to the side of his unknown father, Aymer must put out no hand to
intervene.

But the cost of it--the cost!--He put his shaking hands over his face,
trying to consider the position reasonably.

Even if Peter Masters learnt the truth and claimed

Christopher, Christopher was of age and must act for himself, and
Aymer could not doubt his action. His misery lay in no suspicion of
Christopher's loyal love, but in his own unconquerable, wildly jealous
desire to stand alone in the post of honour, of true fatherhood to the
son of the woman he had loved to such disastrous end. And behind that
lay the bitter, unquenchable resentment that, pretend as he would,
Christopher was not his son, not even of unknown parentage, but in
actual fact the son of the man who had unknowingly robbed him of love,
and whom he had all his life alternately hated and despised.

It was some subtle knowledge of what was passing in that still room
that made Charles Aston a shade less kindly, a little more alert than
usual to hidden meanings, and it was the sight of Aymer's apparent
passivity in the face of all that threatened him, that brought him to
the mind to fight every inch of ground before he put into the hands of
Peter Masters the tangled clue of the story that he alone knew in all
its completeness.

The suspicion that had gripped Peter Masters on the journey down was
slowly stiffening into a certainty, but he was still undecided in his
mind as to the line of action he would take. If these people with
their ultra-heroic code of