“Great Heaven!  What have I done?  What foul injustice to her, what cruel wrong to him.  I thank her that she has never told him!  I can never do so!  Nay, Heaven forbid that he should ever even suspect the truth!  Nor must I ever permit him to come here again; or to any house of mine, where the duchess, where his brother, where every servant even must see the likeness he bears to the family, and—­discover, or, at least, suspect the secret!”

Meanwhile the youth, respectfully attended by the footman, left the house.

As he entered his cab that was waiting at the door, a bitter, bitter change passed over his fine face; the fair brow darkened, the blue eyes contracted and glittered, the lips were firmly compressed for an instant, and then he murmured to himself: 

“That they should think a secret like this could be buried, concealed from me, the most interested of all to find it out!  Was ever son so accursed as I am?  Other sons have been disinherited, outlawed—­but I!  I have been delegalized and degraded from my birth!”

The fine mouth closed with a spasmodic jerk, the brow grew darker, the eyes glittered with intenser fire.  He resumed: 

“It will be difficult, if not impossible, but I will be restored to my rights, or I will ruin and exterminate the ducal house of Hereward!  I am the eldest son of my father; the only son of his first marriage.  I am the heir not only of my father, but of the seven dukes and twenty barons that preceded him, to whom their patent of nobility was granted, to them and their heirs forever!  ‘Their heirs forever!’ It was granted, therefore, to me and to all of my direct line!  Each baron and duke had but his life-interest in his barony or dukedom, and could not alienate it from his heirs by will.  It was an infamous, a fraudulent subterfuge to divorce my poor mother, and so delegalize me a few months before my birth.  But—­I will bide my time!  This false heir may die.  Such things do happen.  And then, as there is no other heir to his title and estates, my father may acknowledge his eldest son, and try to undo the evil he has done.  But if this should not happen, or if my father, who is old, should die, and this false heir inherit, then I will spend every shilling I have inherited from my mother to gain my own.  I will have my rights, though I convict my father of a fraudulent conspiracy, and it requires an act of Parliament to effect my restoration!  And if, after all, this wrong cannot be righted—­although it can be abundantly proved that I am the only son of my father’s first marriage, and the rightful heir of his dukedom, if, after all, I cannot be restored to my position, I will prove the mortal enemy of the race of Scott, and the destruction of the ducal house of Hereward.  Meanwhile I must watch and wait; use this old man as my friend, who will not acknowledge himself as my father!”

These bitter musings lasted until the cab drew up before Langham’s Hotel, and the youth got out and went into the house.