“We always want what we have not,” laughed Mr. Hamlyn.  “I would give all I am worth to possess an ancestral home, no matter if it were grim and gloomy.  We who can boast of only modern wealth look upon these family castles with an envy you have little idea of.”

“If you possess modern wealth, you possess a very good and substantial thing,” she answered, echoing his laugh.—­“Here comes my aunt, full of wonder.”

Full of alarm also.  Mrs. Carradyne stood on the terrace steps, asking if there had been an accident.

“Not much of one, Aunt Emma.  Saladin refused the fence at Ring Gap, and we both came down together.  This gentleman was so obliging as to forego his day’s sport and escort me home.  Mr.—­Mr. Hamlyn, I believe?” she added.  “My aunt, Mrs. Carradyne.”

The stranger confirmed it.  “Philip Hamlyn,” he said to Mrs. Carradyne, lifting his hat.

Gaining the hall-door with slow and gentle steps came a young man, whose beautiful features were wasting more perceptibly day by day, and their hectic growing of a deeper crimson.  “What is amiss, Eliza?” he cried.  “Have you come to grief?  Where’s Saladin?”

“My brother,” she said to Mr. Hamlyn.

Yes, it was indeed Hubert Monk.  For he did not die of that run to the church the past New Year’s Eve.  The death-like faint proved to be a faint, nothing more.  Nothing more then.  But something else was advancing with gradual steps:  steps that seemed to be growing almost perceptible now.

Now and again Hubert fainted in the same manner; his face taking a death-like hue, the blue tinge surrounding his mouth.  Captain Monk, unable longer to shut his eyes to what might be impending, called in the best medical advice that Worcestershire could afford; and the doctors told him the truth—­that Hubert’s days were numbered.

To say that Captain Monk began at once to “set his house in order” would not be quite the right expression, since it was not he himself who was going to die.  But he set his affairs straight as to the future, and appointed another heir in his son’s place—­his nephew, Harry Carradyne.

Harry Carradyne, a brave young lieutenant, was then with his regiment in some almost inaccessible fastness of the Indian Empire.  Captain Monk (not concealing his lamentation and the cruel grief it was to himself personally) wrote word to him of the fiat concerning poor Hubert, together with a peremptory order to sell out and return home as the future heir.  This was being accomplished, and Harry might now be expected almost any day.

But it may as well be mentioned that Captain Monk, never given to be confidential about himself or his affairs, told no one what he had done, with one exception.  Even Mrs. Carradyne was ignorant of the change in her son’s prospects and of his expected return.  The one exception was Hubert.  Soon to lose him, Captain Monk made more of his son than he had ever done, and seemed to like to talk with him.