alien lies forgotten by the dark Austrian lakeside, or
under the monastic shadow of some crumbling Spanish crypt; where a red
cross chills the lonely traveler in the virgin solitudes of Amazonian
forest aisles, or the wild scarlet creepers of Australia trail over a
nameless mound above the trackless stretch of sun-warmed waters--then
at them the world "shoots out its lips with scorn." Not on them lies the
blame.

A wintry, watery sun was shining on the terraces as Lord Royallieu paced
up and down the morning after the Grand Military; his step and limbs
excessively enfeebled, but the carriage of his head and the flash of
his dark hawk's eyes as proud and untamable as in his earliest years.
He never left his own apartments; and no one, save his favorite "little
Berk," ever went to him without his desire. He was too sensitive a
man to thrust his age and ailing health in among the young leaders of
fashion, the wild men of pleasure, the good wits and the good shots of
his son's set; he knew very well that his own day was past; that they
would have listened to him out of the patience of courtesy, but that
they would have wished him away as "no end of a bore." He was too shrewd
not to know this; but he was too quickly galled ever to bear to have it
recalled to him.

He looked up suddenly and sharply: coming toward him he saw the figure
of the Guardsman. For "Beauty" the Viscount had no love; indeed,
well-nigh a hatred, for a reason never guessed by others, and never
betrayed by him.

Bertie was not like the Royallieu race; he resembled his mother's
family. She, a beautiful and fragile creature whom her second son had
loved, for the first years of his life, as he would have thought it now
impossible that he could love anyone, had married the Viscount with no
affection toward him, while he had adored her with a fierce and jealous
passion that her indifference only inflamed. Throughout her married
life, however, she had striven to render loyalty and tenderness toward
a lord into whose arms she had been thrown, trembling and reluctant; of
his wife's fidelity he could not entertain a doubt; though, that he had
never won her heart, he could not choose but know. He knew more, too;
for she had told it him with a noble candor before he wedded her; knew
that the man she did love was a penniless cousin, a cavalry officer, who
had made a famous name among the wild mountain tribes of Northern India.
This cousin, Alan Bertie--a fearless