“I see,” said the father over his study pipe and with his glasses fixed on remote distances above the head of the current sympathizer, “I see more and more clearly that the tale of my sacrifices is not yet at an end. . . .  In many respects he is like her. . . .  Quick.  Too quick. . . .  He must choose.  But I know his choice.  Yes, yes,—­I’m not blind.  She’s worked upon him. . . .  I have done what I could to bring out the manhood in him.  Perhaps it will bear the strain. . . .  It will be a wrench, old man—­God knows.”

He did his very best to make it a wrench.

2

Benham’s mother, whom he saw quarterly and also on the first of May, because it was her birthday, touched and coloured his imagination far more than his father did.  She was now Lady Marayne, and a prominent, successful, and happy little lady.  Her dereliction had been forgiven quite soon, and whatever whisper of it remained was very completely forgotten during the brief period of moral kindliness which followed the accession of King Edward the Seventh.  It no doubt contributed to her social reinstatement that her former husband was entirely devoid of social importance, while, on the other hand, Sir Godfrey Marayne’s temporary monopoly of the caecal operation which became so fashionable in the last decade of Queen Victoria’s reign as to be practically epidemic, created a strong feeling in her favour.

She was blue-eyed and very delicately complexioned, quick-moving, witty, given to little storms of clean enthusiasm; she loved handsome things, brave things, successful things, and the respect and affection of all the world.  She did quite what she liked upon impulse, and nobody ever thought ill of her.

Her family were the Mantons of Blent, quite good west-country people.  She had broken away from them before she was twenty to marry Benham, whom she had idealized at a tennis party.  He had talked of his work and she had seen it in a flash, the noblest work in the world, him at his daily divine toil and herself a Madonna surrounded by a troupe of Blessed Boys—­all of good family, some of quite the best.  For a time she had kept it up even more than he had, and then Nolan had distracted her with a realization of the heroism that goes to the ends of the earth.  She became sick with desire for the forests of Brazil, and the Pacific, and—­a peak in Darien.  Immediately the school was frowsty beyond endurance, and for the first time she let herself perceive how dreadfully a gentleman and a scholar can smell of pipes and tobacco.  Only one course lay open to a woman of spirit. . . .

For a year she did indeed live like a woman of spirit, and it was at Nolan’s bedside that Marayne was first moved to admiration.  She was plucky.  All men love a plucky woman.

Sir Godfrey Marayne smelt a good deal of antiseptic soap, but he talked in a way that amused her, and he trusted as well as adored her.  She did what she liked with his money, her own money, and her son’s trust money, and she did very well.  From the earliest Benham’s visits were to a gracious presence amidst wealthy surroundings.  The transit from the moral blamelessness of Seagate had an entirely misleading effect of ascent.