’Yes, she is a proud woman—­a proud, hard woman—­and she has steeped Lesbia’s mind in all her own pet ideas and prejudices.  Yet, God knows, we have little reason to hold our heads high,’ said Maulevrier, with a gloomy look.

John Hammond did not reply to this remark:  perhaps there was some difficulty for a man situated as he was in finding a fit reply.  He smoked in silence, looking down at the pure swift waters of the Rotha tumbling over the crags and boulders below.

’Doesn’t somebody say there is always a skeleton in the cupboard, and the nobler and more ancient the race the bigger the skeleton?’ said Maulevrier, with a philosophical air.

’Yes, your family secret is an attribute of a fine old race.  The Pelopidae, for instance—­in their case it was not a single skeleton, but a whole charnel house.  I don’t think your skeleton need trouble you, Maulevrier.  It belongs to the remote past.’

‘Those things never belong to the past,’ said the young man.  ’If it were any other kind of taint—­profligacy—­madness, even—­the story of a duel that went very near murder—­a runaway wife—­a rebellious son—­a cruel husband.  I have heard such stories hinted at in the records of families.  But our story means disgrace.  I seldom see strangers putting their heads together at the club without fancying they are telling each other about my grandfather, and pointing me out as the grandson and heir of a thief.’

‘Why use unduly hard words?’

’Why should I stoop to sophistication, with you, my friend.  Dishonesty is dishonesty all the world over; and to plunder Rajahs on a large scale is no less vile than to pick a pocket on Ludgate Hill.’

‘Nothing was ever proved against your grandfather.’

’No, he died in the nick of time, and the inquiry was squashed, thanks to the Angersthorpe interest, and my grandmother’s cleverness.  But if he had lived a few weeks longer England would have rung with the story of his profligacy and dishonour.  Some people say he committed suicide in order to escape the inquiry; but I have heard my mother emphatically deny this.  My father told her that he had often talked with the people who kept the little inn where his father died, and they were clear enough in their assertion that the death was a natural death—­the sudden collapse of an exhausted constitution.’

’Was it on account of this scandal that your father spent the best part of his life away from England?’ Hammond asked, feeling that it was a relief to Maulevrier to talk about this secret burden of his.

The young Earl was light-hearted and frivolous by nature, yet even he had his graver moments; and upon this subject of the old Maulevrier scandal he was peculiarly sensitive, perhaps all the more so because his grandmother had never allowed him to speak to her about it, had never satisfied his curiosity upon any details of that painful story.