“Lord Scroope!”

“I know what you are going to say, Sophie.”

“I don’t know that I am as yet disposed to marry for the sake of a house to shelter me.”

“Of course you would say that; but still I think that I have been right to tell you.  I am sure you will believe my assurance that Jack knows nothing of all this.”

That same evening he said nearly the same thing to his brother, though in doing so he made no special allusion to Sophie Mellerby.  “I know that there is a great deal that a fellow should do, living in such a house as this, but I am not the man to do it.  It’s a very good kind of life, if you happen to be up to it.  I am not, but you are.”

“My dear Fred, you can’t change the accidents of birth.”

“In a great measure I can; or at least we can do so between us.  You can’t be Lord Scroope, but you can be master of Scroope Manor.”

“No I can’t;—­and, which is more, I won’t.  Don’t think I am uncivil.”

“You are uncivil, Jack.”

“At any rate I am not ungrateful.  I only want you to understand thoroughly that such an arrangement is out of the question.  In no condition of life would I care to be the locum tenens for another man.  You are now five or six and twenty.  At thirty you may be a married man with an absolute need for your own house.”

“I would execute any deed.”

“So that I might be enabled to keep the owner of the property out of the only place that is fit for him!  It is a power which I should not use, and do not wish to possess.  Believe me, Fred, that a man is bound to submit himself to the circumstances by which he is surrounded, when it is clear that they are beneficial to the world at large.  There must be an Earl of Scroope, and you at present are the man.”

They were sitting together out upon the terrace after dinner, and for a time there was silence.  His brother’s arguments were too strong for the young lord, and it was out of his power to deal with one so dogmatic.  But he did not forget the last words that had been spoken.  It may be that “I shall not be the man very long,” he said at last.

“Any of us may die to-day or to-morrow,” said Jack.

“I have a kind of presentiment,—­not that I shall die, but that I shall never see Scroope again.  It seems as though I were certainly leaving for ever a place that has always been distasteful to me.”

“I never believe anything of presentiments.”

“No; of course not.  You’re not that sort of fellow at all.  But I am.  I can’t think of myself as living here with a dozen old fogies about the place all doing nothing, touching their hats, my-lording me at every turn, looking respectable, but as idle as pickpockets.”

“You’ll have to do it.”

“Perhaps I shall, but I don’t think it.”  Then there was again silence for a time.  “The less said about it the better, but I know that I’ve got a very difficult job before me in Ireland.”