Bertie was not like the Royallieu race; he resembled his mother’s family.  She, a beautiful and fragile creature whom her second son had loved, for the first years of his life, as he would have thought it now impossible that he could love anyone, had married the Viscount with no affection toward him, while he had adored her with a fierce and jealous passion that her indifference only inflamed.  Throughout her married life, however, she had striven to render loyalty and tenderness toward a lord into whose arms she had been thrown, trembling and reluctant; of his wife’s fidelity he could not entertain a doubt; though, that he had never won her heart, he could not choose but know.  He knew more, too; for she had told it him with a noble candor before he wedded her; knew that the man she did love was a penniless cousin, a cavalry officer, who had made a famous name among the wild mountain tribes of Northern India.  This cousin, Alan Bertie—­a fearless and chivalrous soldier, fitter for the days of knighthood than for these—­had seen Lady Royallieu at Nice, some three years after her marriage; accident had thrown them across each other’s path; the old love, stronger, perhaps, now than it had ever been, had made him linger in her presence—­had made her shrink from sending him to exile.  Evil tongues at last had united their names together; Alan Bertie had left the woman he idolized lest slander should touch her through him, and fallen two years later under the dark dank forests on the desolate moor-side of the hills of Hindostan, where long before he had rendered “Bertie’s Horse” the most famous of all the wild Irregulars of the East.

After her death, Lord Royallieu found Alan’s miniature among her papers, and recalled those winter months by the Mediterranean till he cherished, with the fierce, eager, self-torture of a jealous nature, doubts and suspicions that, during her life, one glance from her eyes would have disarmed and abashed.  Her second and favorite child bore her family name—­her late lover’s name; and, in resembling her race, resembled the dead soldier.  It was sufficient to make him hate Bertie with a cruel and savage detestation, which he strove indeed to temper, for he was by nature a just man, and, in his better moments, knew that his doubts wronged both the living and the dead; but which colored, too strongly to be dissembled, all his feelings and his actions toward his son, and might both have soured and wounded any temperament less nonchalantly gentle and supremely careless than Cecil’s.

As it was, Bertie was sometimes surprised at his father’s dislike to him, but never thought much about it, and attributed it, when he did think of it, to the caprices of a tyrannous old man.  To be jealous of the favor shown to his boyish brother could never for a moment have come into his imagination.  Lady Royallieu with her last words had left the little fellow, a child of three years old, in the affection and the care of Bertie—­himself then a boy of twelve or fourteen—­and little as he thought of such things now, the trust of his dying mother had never been wholly forgotten.