rses and
grooms who hissed cheerfully while they curried and brushed them. He
hated the town house and was, in fact, very glad that he was scarcely
ever taken to it. People, it seemed, did not care to come either to
the town house or to Mount Dunstan. That was why he did not know other
little boys. Again--for the mysterious reason--people did not care that
their children should associate with him. How did he discover this?
He never knew exactly. He realised, however, that without distinct
statements, he seemed to have gathered it through various disconnected
talks with Brough. She had not remained with him long, having "bettered
herself" greatly and gone away in glum satisfaction, but she had stayed
long enough to convey to him things which became part of his existence,
and smouldered in his little soul until they became part of himself. The
ancestors who had hewn their way through their enemies with battle-axes,
who had been fierce and cruel and unconquerable in their savage pride,
had handed down to him a burning and unsubmissive soul. At six years
old, walking with Brough in Kensington Gardens, and seeing other
children playing under the care of nurses, who, he learned, were not
inclined to make advances to his attendant, he dragged Brough away with
a fierce little hand and stood apart with her, scowling haughtily, his
head in the air, pretending that he disdained all childish gambols, and
would have declined to join in them, even if he had been besought to so
far unbend. Bitterness had been planted in him then, though he had
not understood, and the sourness of Brough had been connected with no
intelligence which might have caused her to suspect his feelings, and no
one had noticed, and if anyone had noticed, no one would have cared in
the very least.

When Brough had gone away to her far superior place, and she had been
succeeded by one variety of objectionable or incompetent person after
another, he had still continued to learn. In different ways he silently
collected information, and all of it was unpleasant, and, as he grew
older, it took for some years one form. Lack of resources, which should
of right belong to persons of rank, was the radical objection to his
people. At the town house there was no money, at Mount Dunstan there was
no money. There had been so little money even in his grandfather's time
that his father had inherited comparative beggary. The fourteenth Earl
of Mount Dunstan did not call it "compa