the Duchess.

"I did not know why exactly. It was not affection or attraction. It was
a sort of resentment of the beastly unfairness of things. The bottomless
gulf seemed to yawn in her path when she was nothing but a baby.
Everything was being tossed into it before she had taken a step. I began
to keep an eye on her and prevent things--or assist them. It was more
fury than benevolence, but it has gone on for years--behind the shut
door."

"Are you quite sure you have been entirely free from all affection for
her?" The Duchess asked the question impersonally though with a degree
of interest.

"I think so. I am less sure that I have the power to feel what is called
'affection' for any one. I think that I have felt something nearer it
for Donal--and for you--than for any one else. But when the child talked
to me in the wood I felt for the first time that I wished her to know
that my relation to her mother was not the reason for her hating me
which she had believed."

"She shall be made to understand," said the Duchess.

"She must," he said, "_because of the rest_."

The last four words were, as it were, italicised. Now, she felt, she was
probably about to hear the chief thing he had been approaching. So she
waited attentively.

"Behind a door has been shut another thing," he said and he endeavoured
to say it with his usual detached rigidity of calm, but did not wholly
succeed. "It is the outcome of the generations and the centuries at
present diminishing in value and dignity. The past having had its will
of me and the present and future having gripped me--if I had had a
son--"

As if in a flash she saw as he lingered on the words that he was
speaking of a thing of which he had secretly thought often and much,
though he had allowed no human being to suspect it. She had not
suspected it herself. In a secretive, intense way he had passionately
desired a son.

"If you had had a son--" she repeated.

"He would have stood for both--the past and the future--at the
beginning of a New World," he ended.

He said it with such deliberate meaning that the magnitude of his
possible significance caused her to draw a sudden breath.

"Is it going to be a New World?" she said.

"It cannot be the old one. I don't take it upon myself to describe the
kind of world it will be. That will depend upon the men and women who
build it. Those who were born during the last few years--those who are
about to be born now."

Then she k