as perhaps no
other woman but Lady Cantourne could have understood; but Africa was,
so to speak, blotted out of Sir John Meredith's map of the world. It was
there that he kept his skeleton--the son who had been his greatest pride
and his deepest humiliation--his highest hope in life--almost the only
failure of his career.

He stood there by the window, looking out with that well-bred interest
in details of sport and pastime which was part of his creed. He braved
it out even before the woman who had been a better friend to him than
his dead wife. Not even to her would he confess that any event of
existence could reach him through the impenetrable mask he wore before
the world. Not even she must know that aught in his life could breathe
of failure or disappointment. As it is given to the best of women
to want to take their sorrows to another, so the strongest men
instinctively deny their desire for sympathy.

Lady Cantourne, pretending to select another sheet of note-paper,
glanced at him with a pathetic little smile. Although they had never
been anything to each other, these two people had passed through many
of the trials to which humanity is heir almost side by side. But neither
had ever broken down. Each acted as a sort of mental tonic on the other.
They had tacitly agreed, years before, to laugh at most things. She saw,
more distinctly than any, the singular emptiness of his clothes, as if
the man was shrinking, and she knew that the emptiness was of the heart.

Sir John Meredith had taught his son that Self and Self alone reigns in
the world. He had taught him that the thing called Love, with a capital
L, is nearly all Self, and that it finally dies in the arms of Self. He
had told him that a father's love, or a son's, or a mother's, is merely
a matter of convenience, and vanishes when Self asserts itself.

Upon this principle they were both acting now, with a strikingly
suggestive similarity of method. Neither was willing to admit to the
world in general, and to the other in particular, that a cynical theory
could possibly be erroneous.

"I am sorry that our young friend is going to leave us," said Sir John,
taking up and unfolding the morning paper. "He is honest and candid, if
he is nothing else."

This meant that Guy Oscard's admiration for Millicent Chyne had never
been concealed for a moment, and Lady Cantourne knew it.

"He interests me," went on the old aristocrat, studying the newspaper;
and his he