habit of remarking. His wife had been a hard, worldly,
well-connected woman, who presented him with two unnatural children, a
girl and a boy, and grew harder, more worldly, less handsome, in the
process. The migration to Liverpool, which took place when he was sixty
and she forty-two, broke what she still had of heart, but she lingered on
twelve years, finding solace in bridge, and being haughty towards
Liverpool. Old Heythorp saw her to her rest without regret. He had felt
no love for her whatever, and practically none for her two children--they
were in his view colourless, pragmatical, very unexpected characters.
His son Ernest--in the Admiralty--he thought a poor, careful stick. His
daughter Adela, an excellent manager, delighting in spiritual
conversation and the society of tame men, rarely failed to show him that
she considered him a hopeless heathen. They saw as little as need be of
each other. She was provided for under that settlement he had made on
her mother fifteen years ago, well before the not altogether unexpected
crisis in his affairs. Very different was the feeling he had bestowed on
that son of his "under the rose." The boy, who had always gone by his
mother's name of Larne, had on her death been sent to some relations of
hers in Ireland, and there brought up. He had been called to the Dublin
bar, and married, young, a girl half Cornish and half Irish; presently,
having cost old Heythorp in all a pretty penny, he had died impecunious,
leaving his fair Rosamund at thirty with a girl of eight and a boy of
five. She had not spent six months of widowhood before coming over from
Dublin to claim the old man's guardianship. A remarkably pretty woman,
like a full-blown rose, with greenish hazel eyes, she had turned up one
morning at the offices of "The Island Navigation Company," accompanied by
her two children--for he had never divulged to them his private address.
And since then they had always been more or less on his hands, occupying
a small house in a suburb of Liverpool. He visited them there, but never
asked them to the house in Sefton Park, which was in fact his daughter's;
so that his proper family and friends were unaware of their existence.

Rosamund Larne was one of those precarious ladies who make uncertain
incomes by writing full-bodied storyettes. In the most dismal
circumstances she enjoyed a buoyancy bordering on the indecent; which
always amused old Heythorp's cynicism. But of his