worlds would I have braved the
darkness of his frown, and the woe that spoke like scorn in his voice.
And when, after all warning and prohibition were in vain, Roland found
his son in the middle of the night in a resort of gamblers and sharpers,
carrying all before him with his cue, in the full flush of triumph, and
a great heap of five-franc pieces before him, you may conceive with
what wrath the proud, hasty, passionate man drove out, cane in hand, the
obscene associates, flinging after them the son's ill-gotten gains;
and with what resentful humiliation the son was compelled to follow the
father home. Then Roland took the boy to England, but not to the
old Tower; that hearth of his ancestors was still too sacred for the
footsteps of the vagrant heir!

CHAPTER V.

The Hearts Without Trust, and The World Without a Guide.

And then, vainly grasping at every argument his blunt sense could
suggest, then talked Roland much and grandly of the duties men
owed,--even if they threw off all love to their father, still to their
father's name; and then his pride, always so lively, grew irritable and
harsh, and seemed, no doubt, to the perverted ears of the son, unlovely
and unloving. And that pride, without serving one purpose of good, did
yet more mischief; for the youth caught the disease, but in a wrong way.
And he said to himself,--

"Ho, then, my father is a great man, with all these ancestors and big
words! And he has lands and a castle; and yet how miserably we live, and
how he stints me! But if he has cause for pride in all these dead men,
why, so have I. And are these lodgings, these appurtenances, fit for the
'gentleman' he says I am?"

Even in England the gypsy blood broke out as before, and the youth found
vagrant associates,--Heaven knows how or where; strange-looking forms,
gaudily shabby and disreputably smart, were seen lurking in the corner
of the street, or peering in at the window, slinking off if they saw
Roland: and Roland could not stoop to be a spy. And the son's heart grew
harder and harder against his father, and his father's face now never
smiled on him. Then bills came in, and duns knocked at the door,--bills
and duns to a man who shrank from the thought of a debt as an ermine
from a spot on its fur! And the son's short answer to remonstrance was:
"Am I not a gentleman? These are the things gentlemen require." Then
perhaps Roland remembered the experiment of his French friend, and left
his