“As you like,” said the elder man.  “I have no engagements yet.”

Lightmark left him with a genial nod, and a moment later Rainham saw him through the window passing with long impetuous strides across the bridge.  Then he returned to his desk, and wrote a letter or two until the light failed, when he pushed his chair back, and sat, pen in hand, looking meditatively, vaguely, at the antiquated maps upon the walls.

Presently his eye fell on Lightmark’s derelict paper, with its scribble of a girl’s head.  He considered it thoughtfully for some time, starting a little, and covering it with his blotting-paper, when Mrs. Bullen, his housekeeper, entered with a cup of tea—­a freak of his nerves which made him smile when she had gone.

Even then he left his tea for a long time, cooling and untasted, while he sat lethargically lolling back, and regarding from time to time the pencilled profile with his sad eyes.

CHAPTER II

The period of Lightmark’s boyhood had not been an altogether happy one.  His earliest recollections carried him back to a time when he lived a wandering, desolate life with his father and mother, in an endless series of Continental hotels and pensions.  He was prepared to assert, with confidence, that his mother had been a very beautiful person, who carried an air of the most abundant affection for him on the numerous occasions when she received her friends.  Of his father, who had, as far as possible, ignored his existence, he remembered very little.

During these years there had been frequent difficulties, the nature of which he had since learned entirely to comprehend; controversies with white-waistcoated proprietors of hotels and voluble tradespeople, generally followed by a severance of hastily-cemented friendships, and a departure of apparently unpremeditated abruptness.

When his mother died, he was sent to a fairly good school in England, where his father occasionally visited him, and where he had been terribly bullied at first, and had afterwards learned to bully in turn.  He spent his holidays in London, at the house of his grandmother—­an excellent old lady, who petted and scolded him almost simultaneously, who talked mysteriously about his “poor dear father,” and took care that he went to church regularly, and had dancing-lessons three times a week.

His father’s death, which occurred at Monaco somewhat unexpectedly, and on the subject of which his grandmother maintained a certain reserve, affected the boy but little; in fact, the first real grief which he could remember to have experienced was when the old lady herself died—­he was then nineteen years old—­leaving him her blessing and a sum of Consols sufficient to produce an income of about L250 a year.

The boy’s inclinations leaned in the direction of Oxford, and in this he was supported by his only-surviving relative, his uncle, Colonel Lightmark, a loud-voiced cavalry officer, who had been the terror of Richard’s juvenile existence, and who, as executor of the old lady’s will, was fully aware of the position in which her death had left him, and her desire that he should go into the Church.