you'd pull through. Of course there couldn't be any doubt of
that--you've been through too many, eh?"

Cluny always assumed that Gaston had had numberless tragical adventures
which, if told, must make Dumas turn in his grave with envy.

Gaston smiled, and laid a hand upon the other's knee. "I'm not
shell-proof, Vosse, and it was rather a narrow squeak, I'm told. But I'm
kept, you see, for a worse fate and a sadder."

"I say, Belward, you don't mean that! Your eyes go so queer sometimes,
that a chap doesn't know what to think. You ought to live to a hundred.
You'll have to. You've got it all--"

"Oh no, my boy, I haven't got anything." He waved his hand pleasantly
towards his grandfather. "I'm on the knees of the gods merely."

Cluny turned on Sir William.

"It isn't any secret, is it, sir? He gets the lot, doesn't he?"

Sir William's occasional smile came.

"I fancy there's some condition about the plate, the pictures, and the
title; but I do not suppose that matters meanwhile."

He spoke half-musingly and with a little unconscious irony, and the boy,
vaguely knowing that there was a cross-current somewhere, drifted.

"No, of course not; he can have fun enough without them, can't he?"

Lady Dargan here soothingly broke in, inquiring about Gaston's illness,
and showing a tactful concern. But the nephew persisted:

"I say, Belward, Aunt Sophie was cut up no end when she heard of it. She
wouldn't go out to dinner that night at Lord Dunfolly's, and, of course,
I didn't go. And I wanted to; for Delia Gasgoyne was to be there, and
she's ripping."

Lady Dargan, in spite of herself, blushed, but without confusion, and
Gaston adroitly led the conversation otherwhere. Presently she said that
they were to be at their villa in France during the late summer, and if
he chanced to be abroad would he come? He said that he intended to visit
his uncle in Paris, but that afterwards he would be glad to visit them
for a short time.

She looked astonished. "With your uncle Ian!"

"Yes. He is to show me art-life, and all that."

She looked troubled. He saw that she wished to say something.

"Yes, Lady Dargan?" he asked.

She spoke with fluttering seriousness.

"I asked you once to come to me if you ever needed a friend. I do not
wait for that. I ask you not to go to your uncle."

"Why?"

He was thinking that, despite social artifice and worldliness, she was
sentimental.

"Because there will be trouble. I can see it