oming upon the top of this, introduced
a peculiar complication that provided much work for tactful
intermediaries, and gave great and increasing scope for painful
delicacies on the part of Mr. Benham as the boy grew up.

"I see," said the father over his study pipe and with his glasses fixed
on remote distances above the head of the current sympathizer, "I see
more and more clearly that the tale of my sacrifices is not yet at an
end.... In many respects he is like her.... Quick. Too quick.... He must
choose. But I know his choice. Yes, yes,--I'm not blind. She's worked
upon him.... I have done what I could to bring out the manhood in him.
Perhaps it will bear the strain.... It will be a wrench, old man--God
knows."

He did his very best to make it a wrench.

2

Benham's mother, whom he saw quarterly and also on the first of May,
because it was her birthday, touched and coloured his imagination far
more than his father did. She was now Lady Marayne, and a prominent,
successful, and happy little lady. Her dereliction had been forgiven
quite soon, and whatever whisper of it remained was very completely
forgotten during the brief period of moral kindliness which followed
the accession of King Edward the Seventh. It no doubt contributed to
her social reinstatement that her former husband was entirely devoid
of social importance, while, on the other hand, Sir Godfrey Marayne's
temporary monopoly of the caecal operation which became so fashionable
in the last decade of Queen Victoria's reign as to be practically
epidemic, created a strong feeling in her favour.

She was blue-eyed and very delicately complexioned, quick-moving, witty,
given to little storms of clean enthusiasm; she loved handsome things,
brave things, successful things, and the respect and affection of all
the world. She did quite what she liked upon impulse, and nobody ever
thought ill of her.

Her family were the Mantons of Blent, quite good west-country people.
She had broken away from them before she was twenty to marry Benham,
whom she had idealized at a tennis party. He had talked of his work and
she had seen it in a flash, the noblest work in the world, him at
his daily divine toil and herself a Madonna surrounded by a troupe of
Blessed Boys--all of good family, some of quite the best. For a time she
had kept it up even more than he had, and then Nolan had distracted her
with a realization of the heroism that goes to the ends of the earth.