table crowded
with miscellaneous volumes of poets, critics, and novelists--mainly,
however, with the first two. Aldous Raeburn read few novels, and those
with a certain impatience. His mind was mostly engaged in a slow wrestle
with difficult and unmanageable fact; and for that transformation and
illumination of fact in which the man of idealist temper must sometimes
take refuge and comfort, he went easily and eagerly to the poets and to
natural beauty. Hardly any novel writing, or reading, seemed to him
worth while. A man, he thought, might be much better employed than in
doing either.

Above the mantelpiece was his mother's picture--the picture of a young
woman in a low dress and muslin scarf, trivial and empty in point of
art, yet linked in Aldous's mind with a hundred touching recollections,
buried all of them in the silence of an unbroken reserve. She had died
in childbirth when he was nine; her baby had died with her, and her
husband, Lord Maxwell's only son and surviving child, fell a victim two
years later to a deadly form of throat disease, one of those ills which
come upon strong men by surprise, and excite in the dying a sense of
helpless wrong which even religious faith can only partially soothe.

Aldous remembered his mother's death; still more his father's, that
father who could speak no last message to his son, could only lie dumb
upon his pillows, with those eyes full of incommunicable pain, and the
hand now restlessly seeking, now restlessly putting aside the small and
trembling hand of the son. His boyhood had been spent under the shadow
of these events, which had aged his grandfather, and made him too early
realise himself as standing alone in the gap of loss, the only hope left
to affection and to ambition. This premature development, amid the most
melancholy surroundings, of the sense of personal importance--not in any
egotistical sense, but as a sheer matter of fact--had robbed a nervous
and sensitive temperament of natural stores of gaiety and elasticity
which it could ill do without. Aldous Raeburn had been too much thought
for and too painfully loved. But for Edward Hallin he might well have
acquiesced at manhood in a certain impaired vitality, in the scholar's
range of pleasures, and the landowner's customary round of duties.

It was to Edward Hallin he was writing to-night, for the stress and stir
of feeling caused by the events of the day, and not least by his
grandfather's outburst, seemed