Yes, the birthday festival was a perfect triumph, and the fame of Lone went forth to the uttermost ends of the earth.  The English Colonists at Australia, Cape of Good Hope, and New Zealand, read all about it in copies of the London News, sent out to them by thoughtful London friends.  We remember the day, some years since, when we, sitting by our cottage fire, read all about it in an illustrated paper, and pondered over the happy fate of those who could live in paradise while still on earth.  Five years later, we would not have changed places with the Duke of Hereward.

But this is a digression.

The duke was in his earthly heaven; but was the duke happy, or even content?

Ah! no.  He was overwhelmed with debt.  Even Lone was mortgaged as deeply as it could be—­that is, as to the extent of the duke’s own life interests in the estate.  Beyond that he could not burden the estate, which was entailed upon his heirs male.  Besides his financial embarrassments, the duke was afflicted with another evil—­he was consumed with a fever too common with prince and with peasant, as well as with peer—­the fever of a land hunger.

The prince desires to add province to province; the peer to add manor to manor; the peasant to own a little home of his own, and then to add acre to acre.

The Lord of Lone glorying in his earthly paradise, wished to see it enlarged, wished to add one estate to another until he should become the largest land-owner in Scotland, or have his land-hunger appeased.  He bought up all the land adjoining Lone, that could be purchased at any price, paying a little cash down, and giving notes for the balance on each purchase.  Thus, in the course of three years, Lone was nearly doubled in territorial extent.

But the older creditors became clamorous.  Bond, and mortgage holders threatened foreclosure, and the financial affairs of the “mad duke,” outwardly and apparently so prosperous, were really very desperate.  The family were seriously in danger of expulsion from Lone.

It was at this crisis that the devoted son came to the help of his father—­not wisely, as many people thought then—­not fortunately, as it turned out.  To prevent his father from being compelled to leave Lone, and to protect him from the persecution of creditors, the young Marquis of Arondelle performed an act of self-sacrifice and filial devotion seldom equalled in the world’s history.  He renounced all his own entailed rights, and sold all his prospective life interest in Lone.  His was a young, strong life, good for fifty or sixty years longer.  His interest brought a sum large enough to pay off the mortgage on Lone and to settle all others of his father’s outstanding debts.

Thus peaceable possession of Lone might have been secured to the family during the natural life of the duke.  At the demise of the duke, instead of descending to his son and heir, it would pass into the possession of other parties, with whom it would remain as long the heir should live.