artled and thrilled him with the
following announcement:--

"Listen, Eldred,--what do you think? I've found out at last why Uncle
Jock won't tell about grandfather, and why there's an empty place in
the big album where he ought to be. Ailie told me. I bothered her,
and bothered her, till she said I should hear it for a warning; and I
think you ought to hear it for a warning too. She says grandfather
served the East India Company for forty years. He was a grand soldier,
and a sportsman; a great tall man, like you will be. Ailie says you
'have his face.' But he went to hell"--this in an awestruck
whisper--"through eating too much opium, like some of the natives do
out there. I wonder if it's nice stuff to eat; don't you?"

To the boy of ten, listening with rapt interest, his grandfather's
backsliding had sounded only a few degrees more heinous than
gormandising at Christmas; and since Ailie had proved obdurate when
pressed, and even bribed for further information, the spark of
curiosity had died out for lack of fuel. But to the man of
five-and-thirty, racked with reawakened passion, and with a restless
irritability, whose significance could no longer be ignored, the memory
of his brother's whispered revelation flashed like a lightning-streak
across his present dilemma; leaving him in the grasp of those invisible
forces that are the true masters of destiny; that must either break or
be broken by man's individual spirit and will. For some of us the
struggle is conscious; for some unconscious; for others it never arises
at all: because only the touchstone of circumstance can evoke any one
of those past lives whereof each single life is so mysteriously compact.

For Eldred Lenox, imbued with his uncle's iron creed, the fight would,
of necessity, be conscious and unremitting. But he had no heart to
begin it yet. He felt as a man may feel who is suddenly struck blind.
Thought, movement, life itself, seemed paralysed by a fear unnameable,
and new; the fear of that other self, who is the arch-enemy of us all.

One certainty alone stood out, like a black headland from a sea of
mist; all immediate hope of ratifying his marriage was at an end.
There spoke his tyrannical conscience with disconcerting directness:
and Lenox had never acquired the art of disguising plain fact in a
garment of high-sounding words. He told himself straightly that no
right-minded man could deliberately risk handing down to others such a
her