A heavy gloom came now over the Viscount’s still handsome aquiline, saturnine face, as his second son approached up the terrace; Bertie was too like the cavalry soldier whose form he had last seen standing against the rose light of a Mediterranean sunset.  The soldier had been dead eight-and-twenty years; but the jealous hate was not dead yet.

Cecile took off his hunting-cap with a courtesy that sat very well on his habitual languid nonchalance; he never called his father anything but “Royal”; rarely saw, still less rarely consulted him, and cared not a straw for his censure or opinion; but he was too thoroughbred by nature to be able to follow the underbred indecorum of the day which makes disrespect to old age the fashion.  “You sent for me?” he asked, taking the cigarette out of his mouth.

“No, sir,” answered the old lord curtly; “I sent for your brother.  The fools can’t take even a message right now, it seems.”

“Shouldn’t have named us so near alike; it’s often a bore!” said Bertie.

“I didn’t name you, sir; your mother named you,” answered his father sharply; the subject irritated him.

“It’s of no consequence which!” murmured Cecil, with an expostulatory wave of his cigar.  “We’re not even asked whether we like to come into the world; we can’t expect to be asked what we like to be called in it.  Good-day to you, sir.”

He turned to move away to the house, but his father stopped him; he knew that he had been discourteous—­a far worse crime in Lord Royallieu’s eyes than to be heartless.

“So you won the Vase yesterday?” he asked pausing in his walk with his back bowed, but his stern, silver-haired head erect.

“I didn’t—­the King did.”

“That’s absurd, sir,” said the Viscount, in his resonant and yet melodious voice.  “The finest horse in the world may have his back broke by bad riding, and a screw has won before now when it’s been finely handled.  The finish was tight, wasn’t it?”

“Well—­rather.  I have ridden closer spins, though.  The fallows were light.”

Lord Royallieu smiled grimly.

“I know what the Shire ‘plow’ is like,” he said, with a flash of his falcon eyes over the landscape, where, in the days of his youth, he had led the first flight so often; George Rex, and Waterford, and the Berkeleys, and the rest following the rally of his hunting-horn.  “You won much in bets?”

“Very fair, thanks.”

“And won’t be a shilling richer for it this day next week!” retorted the Viscount, with a rasping, grating irony; he could not help darting savage thrusts at this man who looked at him with eyes so cruelly like Alan Bertie’s.  “You play 5 pound points, and lay 500 pounds on the odd trick, I’ve heard, at your whist in the Clubs—­pretty prices for a younger son!”

“Never bet on the odd trick; spoils the game; makes you sacrifice play to the trick.  We always bet on the game,” said Cecil, with gentle weariness; the sweetness of his temper was proof against his father’s attacks upon his patience.