your brother, disliked
and secretly despised by all your dependants, who reserved all their
love and admiration for the 'real master' (oh, I know the cant
phrase), although he chose to abandon his position and yield himself
to the stream of his own inertness, the real master who in the end can
find no better description for these years of faithful service than
'hostility' and 'ingratitude.'"

Sir Adrian halted a pace, a little moved by the speciousness of the
pleading. The incidental reference to that one grief of his brother's
life was of a kind which could never fail to arouse generous sympathy
in his heart. But Mr. Landale had not come to the critical point of
his say, and he did not choose to allow the chapter of emotion to
begin just yet.

"But," he continued, pursuing his restless walk, "again to use your
own phraseology, I am not merely recriminating. I, too, wish you to
understand me. It would be useless to discuss now, what you elect to
call my hostility in past days. I had to keep up the position demanded
by our ancient name; to keep it up amid a society, against whose every
tenet almost--every prejudice, you may call them--you chose to run
counter. My antagonism to your mode of acting and thinking was
precisely measured by your own against the world in which the
Landales, as a family, hold a stake. Let that, therefore, be
dismissed; and let us come at once to the special hostility you
complain of in me, since the troublesome arrival of Aunt Rose and her
wards. As the very thing which I was most anxious to prevent, if
possible, has, after all, come to pass, the present argument may seem
useless; but you have courted it yourself."

"Most anxious to prevent--if possible...!" repeated Sir Adrian,
slowly. "This, from a younger brother, is almost cynical, Rupert!"

"Cynical!" retorted Mr. Landale, with a furious laugh. "Why, you have
given sound to the very word I would, in anybody else's case, have
applied to a behaviour such as yours. Is it possible, Adrian," said
Rupert, turning to look his brother in the eyes with a look of
profound malice, "that it has not occurred to you yet, that _cynical_
will be the verdict the world will pass on the question of your
marriage with that young girl?"

Sir Adrian flushed darkly, and remained silent for a pace or two;
then, with a puzzled look:

"I fail to understand you," he said simply. "I am no longer young, of
course; yet, in years, I am not preposterously old. As