rative" beggary, he called
it beggary pure and simple, and cursed his progenitors with engaging
frankness. He never referred to the fact that in his personable youth he
had married a wife whose fortune, if it had not been squandered, might
have restored his own. The fortune had been squandered in the course of
a few years of riotous living, the wife had died when her third son was
born, which event took place ten years after the birth of her second,
whom she had lost through scarlet fever. James Hubert John Fergus
Saltyre never heard much of her, and barely knew of her past existence
because in the picture gallery he had seen a portrait of a tall, thin,
fretful-looking young lady, with light ringlets, and pearls round
her neck. She had not attracted him as a child, and the fact that he
gathered that she had been his mother left him entirely unmoved. She
was not a loveable-looking person, and, indeed, had been at once
empty-headed, irritable, and worldly. He would probably have been no
less lonely if she had lived. Lonely he was. His father was engaged in
a career much too lively and interesting to himself to admit of his
allowing himself to be bored by an unwanted and entirely superfluous
child. The elder son, who was Lord Tenham, had reached a premature
and degenerate maturity by the time the younger one made his belated
appearance, and regarded him with unconcealed dislike. The worst thing
which could have befallen the younger boy would have been intimate
association with this degenerate youth.

As Saltyre left nursery days behind, he learned by degrees that the
objection to himself and his people, which had at first endeavoured
to explain itself as being the result of an unseemly lack of money,
combined with that unpleasant feature, an uglier one--namely, lack of
decent reputation. Angry duns, beggarliness of income, scarcity of
the necessaries and luxuries which dignity of rank demanded, the
indifference and slights of one's equals, and the ignoring of one's
existence by exalted persons, were all hideous enough to Lord Mount
Dunstan and his elder son--but they were not so hideous as was, to his
younger son, the childish, shamed frenzy of awakening to the truth
that he was one of a bad lot--a disgraceful lot, from whom nothing was
expected but shifty ways, low vices, and scandals, which in the end
could not even be kept out of the newspapers. The day came, in fact,
when the worst of these was seized upon by them and