in his shipping firm well before he was thirty, he had sailed with a wet sheet and a flowing tide; dancers, claret, Cliquot, and piquet; a cab with a tiger; some travel—­all that delicious early-Victorian consciousness of nothing save a golden time.  It was all so full and mellow that he was forty before he had his only love affair of any depth—­with the daughter of one of his own clerks, a liaison so awkward as to necessitate a sedulous concealment.  The death of that girl, after three years, leaving him a, natural son, had been the chief, perhaps the only real, sorrow of his life.  Five years later he married.  What for?  God only knew! as he was in the habit of remarking.  His wife had been a hard, worldly, well-connected woman, who presented him with two unnatural children, a girl and a boy, and grew harder, more worldly, less handsome, in the process.  The migration to Liverpool, which took place when he was sixty and she forty-two, broke what she still had of heart, but she lingered on twelve years, finding solace in bridge, and being haughty towards Liverpool.  Old Heythorp saw her to her rest without regret.  He had felt no love for her whatever, and practically none for her two children—­they were in his view colourless, pragmatical, very unexpected characters.  His son Ernest—­in the Admiralty—­he thought a poor, careful stick.  His daughter Adela, an excellent manager, delighting in spiritual conversation and the society of tame men, rarely failed to show him that she considered him a hopeless heathen.  They saw as little as need be of each other.  She was provided for under that settlement he had made on her mother fifteen years ago, well before the not altogether unexpected crisis in his affairs.  Very different was the feeling he had bestowed on that son of his “under the rose.”  The boy, who had always gone by his mother’s name of Larne, had on her death been sent to some relations of hers in Ireland, and there brought up.  He had been called to the Dublin bar, and married, young, a girl half Cornish and half Irish; presently, having cost old Heythorp in all a pretty penny, he had died impecunious, leaving his fair Rosamund at thirty with a girl of eight and a boy of five.  She had not spent six months of widowhood before coming over from Dublin to claim the old man’s guardianship.  A remarkably pretty woman, like a full-blown rose, with greenish hazel eyes, she had turned up one morning at the offices of “The Island Navigation Company,” accompanied by her two children—­for he had never divulged to them his private address.  And since then they had always been more or less on his hands, occupying a small house in a suburb of Liverpool.  He visited them there, but never asked them to the house in Sefton Park, which was in fact his daughter’s; so that his proper family and friends were unaware of their existence.