another minute he was cantering away from her, towards
the sunset.

Connie went on blindly, the reins on her horse's neck, the passionate
tears dropping on her hands.

CHAPTER XIII

Douglas Falloden rode home rapidly after parting from Connie. Passion,
impatience, bitter regret consumed him. He suffered, and could not
endure to suffer. That life, which had grown up with him as a flattering
and obsequious friend, obeying all his whims, yielding to all his
desires, should now have turned upon him in this traitorous way,
inflicting such monstrous reprisals and rebuffs, roused in him the
astonishment and resentment natural to such a temperament.

He, too, drew rein for a moment at the spot where Connie had looked out
over Flood Castle and its valley. The beautiful familiar sight produced
in him now only a mingling of pain and irritation. The horrid thing was
settled, decided. There was no avoiding ruin, or saving his inheritance.
Then why these long delays, these endless discomforts and humiliations?
The lawyers prolonged things because it paid them to do so; and his poor
father wavered and hesitated from day to day, because physically and
morally he was breaking up. If only his father and mother would have
cleared out of Flood at once--they were spending money they could not
possibly afford in keeping it up--and had left him, Douglas, to do the
odious things, pay the creditors, sell the place, and sweep up the whole
vast mess, with the help of the lawyers, it would have been infinitely
best. His own will felt itself strong and determined enough for any
such task. But Sir Arthur, in his strange, broken state, could not be
brought to make decisions, and would often, after days of gloom and
depression, pass into a fool's mood, when he seemed for the moment to
forget and ignore the whole tragedy. Since he and Douglas had agreed
with the trustees to sell the pictures, that sheer bankruptcy might just
be escaped, Sir Arthur had been extravagantly cheerful. Why not have
their usual shooting-party after all?--one last fling before the end! He
supposed he should end his days in a suburban villa, but till they left
Flood the flag should be kept flying.

During all this time of tension indeed, he was a great trial to his son.
Douglas's quick and proud intelligence was amazed to find his father so
weak and so incompetent under misfortune. All his boyish life he had
looked up to the slender, handsome man, whom he himself so mu