to arrive at Stoke Moreton too late; to find
only the solemn shadow of the mother whom he had loved, and whom he had
grieved; too late to ask for forgiveness; too late for anything but a
wild passion of grief and remorse, and frantic self-accusation.

The scene shifted to ten years later. It was a sultry July evening of
the day on which the woman whom he had loved for years had married his
brother. He was standing on the deck of the steamer which was taking him
from England, looking back at the gray town dwindling against the tawny
curtain of the sunset. In his brain was a wild clamor of wedding-bells,
and across the water, marking the pulse of the sea, came to his outward
ears the slow tolling of a bell on a sunken rock near the harbor mouth.

It seemed to be tolling for the death of all that remained of good in
him. In losing Evelyn, whom he had loved with all the idealism and
reverence of a reckless man for a good woman, he believed, in the
bitterness of his spirit, that he had lost all; that he had been cut
adrift from the last mooring to a better future, that nothing could hold
him back now. And for a time it had been so, and he had drowned his
trouble in a sea in which he wellnigh drowned himself as well.

Once more memory pointed--pointed across five dark years to an evening
when he had sat as he was sitting now, alone by the wide stone hearth in
the hall at Stoke Moreton, after his father's death, and after the
reading of the will. He was the possessor of the old home, which he had
always passionately loved, from which he had been virtually banished so
long. His father, who had never liked him, but who of late years had
hated him as men only hate their eldest sons, had left all in his power
to his second son, had entailed every acre of the Stoke Moreton and
other family properties upon him and his children. Charles could touch
nothing, and over him hung a millstone of debt, from which there was now
no escape. He sat with his head in his hands--the man whom his friends
were envying on his accession to supposed wealth and position--ruined.

A few days later he was summoned to London by a friend whom he had known
for many years. He remembered well that last meeting with the stern old
man whom he had found sitting in his arm-chair with death in his face.
He had once or twice remonstrated with Charles in earlier days, and as
he came into his presence now for the last time, and met his severe
glance, he supposed, w