It was his first love.  Years before, in the vacation before he went to college, his boyish mind had been crossed, by a fancy for a pretty cousin a little older than himself, who had been very kind indeed to Lord Maxwell’s heir.  But then came Cambridge, the flow of a new mental life, his friendship for Edward Hallin, and the beginnings of a moral storm and stress.  When he and the cousin next met, he was quite cold to her.  She seemed to him a pretty piece of millinery, endowed with a trick of parrot phrases.  She, on her part, thought him detestable; she married shortly afterwards, and often spoke to her husband in private of her “escape” from that queer fellow Aldous Raeburn.

Since then he had known plenty of pretty and charming women, both in London and in the country, and had made friends with some of them in his quiet serious way.  But none of them had roused in him even a passing thrill of passion.  He had despised himself for it; had told himself again and again that he was but half a man—­

Ah! he had done himself injustice—­he had done himself injustice!

His heart was light as air.  When at last the sound of a clock striking in the plain roused him with a start, and he sprang up from the heap of stones where he had been sitting in the dusk, he bent down a moment to give a gay caress to his dog, and then trudged off briskly home, whistling under the emerging stars.

CHAPTER VI.

By the time, however, that Aldous Raeburn came within sight of the windows of Maxwell Court his first exaltation had sobered down.  The lover had fallen, for the time, into the background, and the capable, serious man of thirty, with a considerable experience of the world behind him, was perfectly conscious that there were many difficulties in his path.  He could not induce his grandfather to move in the matter of Richard Boyce without a statement of his own feelings and aims.  Nor would he have avoided frankness if he could.  On every ground it was his grandfather’s due.  The Raeburns were reserved towards the rest of the world, but amongst themselves there had always been a fine tradition of mutual trust; and Lord Maxwell amply deserved that at this particular moment his grandson should maintain it.

But Raeburn could not and did not flatter himself that his grandfather would, to begin with, receive his news even with toleration.  The grim satisfaction with which that note about the shooting had been despatched, was very clear in the grandson’s memory.  At the same time it said much for the history of those long years during which the old man and his heir had been left to console each other for the terrible bereavements which had thrown them together, that Aldous Raeburn never for an instant feared the kind of violent outburst and opposition that other men in similar circumstances might have looked forward to.  The just living of a life-time makes a man incapable of any mere selfish handling of another’s interests—­a fact on which the bystander may reckon.