“I hear Chudleigh’s boy is but a poor creature,” said Sir Wilfrid, gravely.  “Lady Henry doesn’t expect him to live.”

“Why, that’s the kind that always does live!” cried Delafield, with angry emphasis.  “And as for Lady Henry, her imagination is a perfect charnel-house.  She likes to think that everybody’s dead or dying but herself.  The fact is that Mervyn is a good deal stronger this year than he was last.  Really, Lady Henry—­” The tone lost itself in a growl of wrath.

“Well, well,” said Sir Wilfrid, smiling, “’A man beduked against his will,’ etcetera.  Good-night, my dear Jacob, and good luck to your old pauper.”

But Delafield turned back a moment on the stairs.

“I say”—­he hesitated—­“you won’t shirk talking to Lady Henry?”

“No, no.  Sunday, certainly—­honor bright.  Oh, I think we shall straighten it out.”

Delafield ran down the stairs, and Sir Wilfrid returned to his warm room and the dregs of his tea.

“Now—­is he in love with her, and hesitating for social reasons?  Or—­is he jealous of this fellow Warkworth?  Or—­has she snubbed him, and both are keeping it dark?  Not very likely, that, in view of his prospects.  She must want to regularize her position.  Or—­is he not in love with her at all?”

On which cogitations there fell presently the strokes of many bells tolling midnight, and left them still unresolved.  Only one positive impression remained—­that Jacob Delafield had somehow grown, vaguely but enormously, in mental and moral bulk during the years since he had left Oxford—­the years of Bury’s Persian exile.  Sir Wilfrid had been an intimate friend of his dead father, Lord Hubert, and on very friendly terms with his lethargic, good-natured mother.  She, by-the-way, was still alive, and living in London with a daughter.  He must go and see them.

As for Jacob, Sir Wilfrid had cherished a particular weakness for him in the Eton-jacket stage, and later on, indeed, when the lad enjoyed a brief moment of glory in the Eton eleven.  But at Oxford, to Sir Wilfrid’s thinking, he had suffered eclipse—­had become a somewhat heavy, apathetic, pseudo-cynical youth, displaying his mother’s inertia without her good temper, too slack to keep up his cricket, too slack to work for the honor schools, at no time without friends, but an enigma to most of them, and, apparently, something of a burden to himself.

And now, out of that ugly slough, a man had somehow emerged, in whom Sir Wilfrid, who was well acquainted with the race, discerned the stirring of all sorts of strong inherited things, formless still, but struggling to expression.

“He looked at me just now, when I talked of his being duke, as his father would sometimes look.”

His father?  Hubert Delafield had been an obstinate, dare-devil, heroic sort of fellow, who had lost his life in the Chudleigh salmon river trying to save a gillie who had missed his footing.  A man much hated—­and much beloved; capable of the most contradictory actions.  He had married his wife for money, would often boast of it, and would, none the less, give away his last farthing recklessly, passionately, if he were asked for it, in some way that touched his feelings.  Able, too; though not so able as the great Duke, his father.