filled their sheets
with matter which for a whole season decent London avoided reading, and
the fast and indecent element laughed, derided, or gloated over.

The memory of the fever of the monstrous weeks which had passed at this
time was not one it was wise for a man to recall. But it was not to be
forgotten--the hasty midnight arrival at Mount Dunstan of father and
son, their haggard, nervous faces, their terrified discussions, and
argumentative raging when they were shut up together behind locked
doors, the appearance of legal advisers who looked as anxious as
themselves, but failed to conceal the disgust with which they were
battling, the knowledge that tongues were clacking almost hysterically
in the village, and that curious faces hurried to the windows when even
a menial from the great house passed, the atmosphere of below-stairs
whispers, and jogged elbows, and winks, and giggles; the final
desperate, excited preparations for flight, which might be ignominiously
stopped at any moment by the intervention of the law, the huddling away
at night time, the hot-throated fear that the shameful, self-branding
move might be too late--the burning humiliation of knowing the
inevitable result of public contempt or laughter when the world next day
heard that the fugitives had put the English Channel between themselves
and their country's laws.

Lord Tenham had died a few years later at Port Said, after descending
into all the hells of degenerate debauch. His father had lived
longer--long enough to make of himself something horribly near an
imbecile, before he died suddenly in Paris. The Mount Dunstan who
succeeded him, having spent his childhood and boyhood under the shadow
of the "bad lot," had the character of being a big, surly, unattractive
young fellow, whose eccentricity presented itself to those who knew
his stock, as being of a kind which might develop at any time into any
objectionable tendency. His bearing was not such as allured, and his
fortune was not of the order which placed a man in the view of the
world. He had no money to expend, no hospitalities to offer and
apparently no disposition to connect himself with society. His
wild-goose chase to America had, when it had been considered worth while
discussing at all, been regarded as being very much the kind of thing a
Mount Dunstan might do with some secret and disreputable end in view.
No one had heard the exact truth, and no one would have been inclined to
b