required on one
or other of the Boards of which he was a director.

The Irish estate--which brought about all his misfortunes--he disposed
of at a ridiculously low figure. He said he would accept any bid,
however small, so that he could sever all connection with the hated
village.

From the day of Angela's elopement he neither saw nor wrote to any
member of his family.

His other sister, Mrs. Chichester, wrote to him from time to
time--telling him one time of the birth of a boy: two years later of
the advent of a girl.

Kingsnorth did not answer any of her letters.

In no way dismayed, Mrs. Chichester continued to write periodically.
She wrote him when her son Alaric went to school and also when he went
to college. Alaric seemed to absorb most of her interest. He was
evidently her favourite child. She wrote more seldom of her daughter
Ethel, and when she did happen to refer to her she dwelt principally on
her beauty and her accomplishments. Five years before, an envelope in
deep mourning came to Kingsnorth, and on opening it he found a letter
from his sister acquainting him with the melancholy news that Mr.
Chichester had ended a life of usefulness at the English bar and had
died, leaving the family quite comfortably off.

Kingsnorth telegraphed his condolences and left instructions for a
suitable wreath to be sent to the funeral. But he did not attend it.
Nor did he at any time express the slightest wish to see his sister nor
did he encourage any suggestion on her part to visit him.

When he was stricken with an illness, from which no hope of recovery
was held out to him, he at once began to put his affairs in order, and
his lawyer spent days with him drawing up statements of his last wishes
for the disposition of his fortune.

With death stretching out its hand to snatch him from a life he had
enjoyed so little, his thoughts, coloured with the fancies of a tired,
sick brain, kept turning constantly, to his dead sister Angela.

From time to time down through the years he had a softened, gentle
remembrance of her. When the news of her death came, furious and
unrelenting as he had been toward her, her passing softened it. Had he
known in time he would have insisted on her burial in the Kingsnorth
vault. But she had already been interred in New York before the news of
her death reached him.

The one bitter hatred of his life had been against the man who had
taken his sister in marriage and in so doing had ki