’I fear so; and now Etta will know we have been talking about Eric.  Oh, I am glad I am going away! it gets too unbearable.  Ursula, I shall write to you, and you must answer me.  Think what a comfort your letters will be to me; I shall be able to depend on what you say.  Lady Betty is so careless, she knows what Etta is, and yet she will leave her letters about, and more than once they have not reached me.  I am afraid that Leah is a little unscrupulous in such matters.’

I was aghast as I listened to her, but she changed the subject quickly.

’What were we talking about?  Oh, I said Giles was hard; and so he was; but Eric was faulty too.

’He was very idle; he would not work, and he thought of nothing but his painting.  Giles always says I encouraged him in his idleness; but this is hardly the truth.  I used to try and coax him to open his books, but he had got this craze for painting, and he spent hours at his easel.  I thought it was a great pity that Giles forced him to take up law; if he had talent it was surely better for him to be an artist; but Giles and Etta persisted in ignoring his talent.  They called his pictures daubs, and ridiculed his artistic notions.’

’Do you really believe that he would have worked successfully as an artist?’

’It is difficult for me to judge.  Eric was so young, and had had little training, and then he only painted in a desultory way:  as I have told you, he was very idle.  I think if Giles had been more fatherly with him, and had remonstrated with him more gently, and showed him the sense and fitness of things, Eric would have been reasonable; but Etta made so much mischief between them that things only got worse and worse.  Eric was extravagant; he never managed money well, and he got into debt, and that made Giles furious, and when Eric lost his temper—­for he was very hot and soon got into a passion—­Giles’s coolness and hard sneering speeches nearly drove Eric wild.  He came to me one day in the garden looking as white as a sheet,—­that was the day before the cheque was missed,—­and told me, in a conscience-stricken voice, that it was all up between him and Giles, he had got into a passion and struck Giles across the face.

’"I don’t know why he did not knock me down,” cried the poor lad.  “I deserved it, for I saw him wince with the pain; but he only took me by the shoulder—­you know how strong Giles is—­and turned me out of the room without saying a word, and there was the mark of my hand across his cheek.  I feel like Cain, I do indeed, Gladys, ’For he that hateth his brother is a murderer’; and I hate Giles.”  And the poor boy—­he was only twenty, Ursula—­put his head down on my shoulder and sobbed like a child.  If only Giles could have seen him then!’

‘Do you know what passed between them?’