on the table. A fire would not have been
out of season, for the evenings were chilly, and it would have had a
cheery look; but there was no attempt at cheeriness. The woman who sat
in one of the high-backed chairs was pale and sad: her folded hands lay
listlessly clasped together on her lap, and the sombre garb that she
wore was as unrelieved by any gleam of brightness as the room itself. In
the gathering gloom of a chilly summer evening, even the rings upon her
fingers could not flash. Her white face, in its setting of rough, wavy
grey hair, over which she wore a covering of black lace, looked almost
statuesque in its profound tranquillity. But it was not the tranquillity
of comfort and prosperity that had settled on that pale, worn,
high-featured face--it was rather the tranquillity that comes of
accepted sorrow and inextinguishable despair.

She had sat thus for fully half an hour when the door was roughly
opened, and the young man whom Mr. Colwyn had named as Wyvis Brand came
lounging into the room. He had been dining, but he was not in evening
dress, and there was something unrestful and reckless in his way of
moving round the room and throwing himself in the chair nearest his
mother's, which roused Mrs. Brand's attention. She turned slightly
towards him, and became conscious at once of the fumes of wine and
strong tobacco with which her son had made her only too familiar. She
looked at him for a moment, then clasped her hands tightly together and
resumed her former position, with her sad face turned to the window. She
may have breathed a sigh as she did so, but Wyvis Brand did not hear it,
and if he had heard it, would not perhaps have very greatly cared.

"Why do you sit in the dark?" he said at last, in a vexed tone.

"I will ring for lights," Mrs. Brand answered quietly.

"Do as you like: I am not going to stay: I am going out," said the young
man.

The hand that his mother had stretched out towards the bell fell to her
side: she was a submissive woman, used to taking her son at his word.

"You are lonely here," she ventured to remark, after a short silence:
"you will be glad when Cuthbert comes down."

"It's a beastly hole," said her son, gloomily. "I would advise Cuthbert
to stay in Paris. What he will do with himself here, I can't imagine."

"He is happy anywhere," said the mother, with a stifled sigh.

Wyvis uttered a short, harsh laugh.

"That can't be said of us, can it?" he exclaimed, putting h