y
self. The other a wastrel, a sot, a liar, the consort of evil women and
disreputable men, a poor, paltry worm living in an oak tree's shade.

And to-night the General had wondered why the police should be coming to
Wuthering Grange; what trail from last night's tragedy led to the
threshold of this house! Yet, while he sat here reading, his own son----
Heigho! "'Tis a mad world, my masters," a mad, mad world indeed. Poor
old chap! Poor, blind, unsuspecting old chap, sitting here all alone and
reading! What was it he was reading while his unnatural son was
slandering him to a stranger?

He walked to the reading desk and bent over the open book that lay upon
it, with a pamphlet beside it and a litter of loose papers all round.

"Fruit Culture," by Adolph Bonnaise. And the pamphlet? He took it up to
look at the title page, for the half of it was smothered under loose
papers, one or two of which his act sent fluttering to the floor. The
April number of _The Gardener and Fruit Grower_. Reading of flowers and
of fruits, of Nature's good and beautiful things, and all the while----
Yes, indeed, Shakespeare was right. It _is_ a mad world! Worse than mad:
it is wicked! And the sons of men are the wickedest things in it!

Oh, well, he mustn't stand wasting time here in moralizing and mooning.
Ailsa was waiting.

The papers he had disturbed lay on the floor, close to a half-filled
scrap basket. Unimportant things enough they were: seedsmen's circulars,
soap advertisements, tailors' announcements, all the litter of
loose-leaf insets that are thrust between the covers of monthly
magazines; quite unimportant, and not worth the trouble he was taking to
gather them up and replace them upon the desk. But---- Oh, well, he
shouldn't like the General to think that when he came into the library
to use his telephone he'd been cad enough to look over his papers; so,
of course--That all of them? Any drop into the waste basket by chance?
Perhaps that bit of white paper with the red blob of sealing wax on each
end might have fallen with the rest. He picked it out of the basket,
turned it over, and decided that it hadn't; smelt it, smiled one of his
curious one-sided smiles, and flung it back into the basket.

Even an old soldier may have his foibles and his weaknesses. It is on
record that Bonaparte had a secret love of bonbons; that Washington had
a passion for barley sugar; and that Drake slept always with anise
seeds within easy reach.