and chivalrous soldier, fitter for
the days of knighthood than for these--had seen Lady Royallieu at Nice,
some three years after her marriage; accident had thrown them across
each other's path; the old love, stronger, perhaps, now than it had
ever been, had made him linger in her presence--had made her shrink
from sending him to exile. Evil tongues at last had united their names
together; Alan Bertie had left the woman he idolized lest slander should
touch her through him, and fallen two years later under the dark dank
forests on the desolate moor-side of the hills of Hindostan, where long
before he had rendered "Bertie's Horse" the most famous of all the wild
Irregulars of the East.

After her death, Lord Royallieu found Alan's miniature among her papers,
and recalled those winter months by the Mediterranean till he cherished,
with the fierce, eager, self-torture of a jealous nature, doubts and
suspicions that, during her life, one glance from her eyes would have
disarmed and abashed. Her second and favorite child bore her family
name--her late lover's name; and, in resembling her race, resembled the
dead soldier. It was sufficient to make him hate Bertie with a cruel
and savage detestation, which he strove indeed to temper, for he was
by nature a just man, and, in his better moments, knew that his doubts
wronged both the living and the dead; but which colored, too strongly
to be dissembled, all his feelings and his actions toward his son, and
might both have soured and wounded any temperament less nonchalantly
gentle and supremely careless than Cecil's.

As it was, Bertie was sometimes surprised at his father's dislike to
him, but never thought much about it, and attributed it, when he did
think of it, to the caprices of a tyrannous old man. To be jealous of
the favor shown to his boyish brother could never for a moment have come
into his imagination. Lady Royallieu with her last words had left the
little fellow, a child of three years old, in the affection and the care
of Bertie--himself then a boy of twelve or fourteen--and little as he
thought of such things now, the trust of his dying mother had never been
wholly forgotten.

A heavy gloom came now over the Viscount's still handsome aquiline,
saturnine face, as his second son approached up the terrace; Bertie
was too like the cavalry soldier whose form he had last seen standing
against the rose light of a Mediterranean sunset. The soldier had been
dead eight-a