ll aspirations whatsoever.

He received no answer, and duly repented the flippant tone he had taken.
He would have been greatly surprised could he have learned that this
last letter was destined to produce a greater effect upon his life than
all he had written before it.

In the meanwhile his father, who had heard of the increasing troubles in
the world of business, wrote him in a constant strain of warning, to
which he paid little attention. His mother's letters, too, betrayed her
anxiety, but expressed what his father's did not, to wit the most
boundless confidence in his power to extricate himself honourably from
all difficulties, together with the assurance that if worst came to
worst she was always ready to help him.

Suddenly and without warning old Saracinesca returned from his
wanderings. He had taken the trouble to keep the family informed of his
movements by his secretary during two or three months and had then
temporarily allowed them to lose sight of him, thereby causing them
considerable anxiety, though an occasional paragraph in a newspaper
reassured them from time to time. Then, on a certain afternoon in
November, he appeared, alone and in a cab, as though he had been out for
a stroll.

"Well, my boy, are you ruined yet?" he inquired, entering Orsino's room
without ceremony.

The young man started from his seat and took the old gentleman's rough
hand, with an exclamation of surprise.

"Yes--you may well look at me," laughed the Prince. "I have grown ten
years younger. And you?" He pushed his grandson into the light and
scrutinised his face fiercely. "And you are ten years older," he
concluded, in a discontented tone.

"I did not know it," answered Orsino with an attempt at a laugh.

"You have been at some mischief. I know it. I can see it."

He dropped the young fellow's arm, shook his head and began to move
about the room. Then he came back all at once and looked up into
Orsino's face from beneath his bushy eyebrows.

"Out with it, I mean to know!" he said, roughly but not unkindly. "Have
you lost money? Are you ill? Are you in love?"

Orsino would certainly have resented the first and the last questions,
if not all three, had they been put to him by his father. There was
something in the old Prince's nature, something warmer and more human,
which appealed to his own. Sant' Ilario was, and always had been,
outwardly cold, somewhat measured in his speech, undemonstrative, a man
not easily mo