‘In the same manner,’ he went on, ’I could detail the annals of the family from that time to the present.  But all through they have been marked by the same latent tragic elements; and I have said enough to show you that in each of the tragedies there was invariably something large, leering, something of which the mind demands explanation, but seeks in vain to find it.  Now we need no longer seek.  Destiny did not design that the last Lord of Orven should any more hide from the world the guilty secret of his race.  It was the will of the gods—­and he betrayed himself.  “Return,” he writes, “the beginning of the end is come.”  What end?

The end—­perfectly well known to Randolph, needing no explanation for him.  The old, old end, which in the ancient dim time led the first lord, loyal still at heart, to forsake his king; and another, still devout, to renounce his cherished faith, and yet another to set fire to the home of his ancestors.  You have called the two last scions of the family “a proud and selfish pair of beings”; proud they were, and selfish too, but you are in error if you think their selfishness a personal one:  on the contrary, they were singularly oblivious of self in the ordinary sense of the word.  Theirs was the pride and the selfishness of race.  What consideration, think you, other than the weal of his house, could induce Lord Randolph to take on himself the shame—­for as such he certainly regards it—­of a conversion to radicalism?  He would, I am convinced, have died rather than make this pretence for merely personal ends.  But he does it—­and the reason?  It is because he has received that awful summons from home; because “the end” is daily coming nearer, and it must not find him unprepared to meet it; it is because Lord Pharanx’s senses are becoming too acute; because the clatter of the servants’ knives at the other end of the house inflames him to madness; because his excited palate can no longer endure any food but the subtlest delicacies; because Hester Dyett is able from the posture in which he sits to conjecture that he is intoxicated; because, in fact, he is on the brink of the dreadful malady which physicians call “General Paralysis of the Insane.”  You remember I took from your hands the newspaper containing the earl’s letter to Cibras, in order to read it with my own eyes.  I had my reasons, and I was justified.  That letter contains three mistakes in spelling:  “here” is printed “hear,” “pass” appears as “pas,” and “room” as “rume.”  Printers’ errors, you say?  But not so—­one might be, two in that short paragraph could hardly be, three would be impossible.  Search the whole paper through, and I think you will not find another.  Let us reverence the theory of probabilities:  the errors were the writer’s, not the printer’s.  General Paralysis of the Insane is known to have this effect on the writing.  It attacks its victims about the period of middle age—­the age