rless English girl
of good family. He went to Rio as first secretary, and died of fever
within seven years of his marriage, leaving a widow and three babies,
the youngest in long clothes. Mother and babies all came over to
England, and were at once established at Fellside. I can remember the
voyage--and I can remember my poor mother who never recovered the blow
of my father's death, and who died in yonder house, after five years of
broken health and broken spirits. We had no one but the dowager to look
to as children--hardly another friend in the world. She did what she
liked with us; she kept the girls as close as nuns, so _they_ have never
heard a hint of the old history; no breach of scandal has reached
_their_ ears. But she could not shut me up in a country house for ever,
though she did succeed in keeping me away from a public school. The time
came when I had to go to the University, and there I heard all that had
been said about Lord Maulevrier. The men who told me about the old
scandal in a friendly way pretended not to believe it; but one night,
when I had got into a row at a wine-party with a tailor's son, he told
me that if his father was a snip my grandfather was a thief, and so he
thought himself the better bred of the two. I smashed his nose for him,
but as it was a decided pug before the row began, that hardly squared
the matter.'

'Did you ever hear the exact story?'

'I have heard a dozen stories; and if only a quarter of them are true my
grandfather was a scoundrel. It seems that he was immensely popular for
the first year or so of his government, gave more splendid
entertainments than had been given at Madras for half a century before
his time, lavished his wealth upon his favourites. Then arose a rumour
that the governor was insolvent and harassed by his creditors, and then
a new source of wealth seemed to be at his command; he was more
reckless, more princely than ever; and then, little by little, there
arose the suspicion that he was trafficking in English interests,
selling his influence to petty princes, winking at those mysterious
crimes by which rightful heirs are pushed aside to make room for
usurpers. Lastly it became notorious that he was the slave of a wicked
woman, false wife, suspected murderess, whose husband, a native prince,
disappeared from the scene just when his existence became perilous to
the governor's reputation. According to one version of the story, the
scandal of this Rajah'