volumes of poets, critics, and novelists—­mainly, however, with the first two.  Aldous Raeburn read few novels, and those with a certain impatience.  His mind was mostly engaged in a slow wrestle with difficult and unmanageable fact; and for that transformation and illumination of fact in which the man of idealist temper must sometimes take refuge and comfort, he went easily and eagerly to the poets and to natural beauty.  Hardly any novel writing, or reading, seemed to him worth while.  A man, he thought, might be much better employed than in doing either.

Above the mantelpiece was his mother’s picture—­the picture of a young woman in a low dress and muslin scarf, trivial and empty in point of art, yet linked in Aldous’s mind with a hundred touching recollections, buried all of them in the silence of an unbroken reserve.  She had died in childbirth when he was nine; her baby had died with her, and her husband, Lord Maxwell’s only son and surviving child, fell a victim two years later to a deadly form of throat disease, one of those ills which come upon strong men by surprise, and excite in the dying a sense of helpless wrong which even religious faith can only partially soothe.

Aldous remembered his mother’s death; still more his father’s, that father who could speak no last message to his son, could only lie dumb upon his pillows, with those eyes full of incommunicable pain, and the hand now restlessly seeking, now restlessly putting aside the small and trembling hand of the son.  His boyhood had been spent under the shadow of these events, which had aged his grandfather, and made him too early realise himself as standing alone in the gap of loss, the only hope left to affection and to ambition.  This premature development, amid the most melancholy surroundings, of the sense of personal importance—­not in any egotistical sense, but as a sheer matter of fact—­had robbed a nervous and sensitive temperament of natural stores of gaiety and elasticity which it could ill do without.  Aldous Raeburn had been too much thought for and too painfully loved.  But for Edward Hallin he might well have acquiesced at manhood in a certain impaired vitality, in the scholar’s range of pleasures, and the landowner’s customary round of duties.

It was to Edward Hallin he was writing to-night, for the stress and stir of feeling caused by the events of the day, and not least by his grandfather’s outburst, seemed to put sleep far off.  On the table before him stood a photograph of Hallin, besides a miniature of his mother as a girl.  He had drawn the miniature closer to him, finding sympathy and joy in its youth, in the bright expectancy of the eyes, and so wrote, as it were, having both her and his friend in mind and sight.

To Hallin he had already spoken of Miss Boyce, drawing her in light, casual, and yet sympathetic strokes as the pretty girl in a difficult position whom one would watch with curiosity and some pity.  To-night his letter, which should have discussed a home colonisation scheme of Hallin’s, had but one topic, and his pen flew.