Inevitable, it seemed.  Yet only so, perhaps, because even a good and conscientious man may fail to understand the obligation under which he lies towards his offspring.

He and his sister Amy passed into the guardianship of Dr Harvey, Mr Rolfe’s old friend, the boy’s godfather, who had done his best to soothe the mind of the dying man with regard to his children’s future.  There were no pecuniary difficulties; the children’s education was provided for, and on coming of age each would have about two thousand pounds.  Dr Harvey, a large-hearted, bright-witted Irishman, with no youngsters of his own, speedily decided that the boy must be sent away to a boarding-school, to have some of the self-will knocked out of him.  Amy continued to live with her aunt for two years more; then the good woman died, and the Doctor took Amy into his own house, which became Harvey’s home during holidays.

The ivy-covered house, in the best residential street of Greystone.  Harvey paused before it.  On the railings hung a brass plate with another name; the good old Doctor had been in his grave for many a year.

What wonder that he never liked the boy?  Harvey, so far as anyone could perceive, had no affection, no good feeling, no youthful freshness or simplicity of heart; moreover, he exhibited precocious arrogance, supported by an obstinacy which had not even the grace of quickening into fieriness; he was often a braggart, and could not be trusted to tell the truth where his self-esteem was ever so little concerned.  How unutterably the Harvey Rolfe of today despised himself at the age of fifteen or so!  Even at that amorphous age, a more loutish, ungainly boy could scarcely have been found.  Bashfulness cost him horrid torments, of course exasperating his conceit.  He hated girls; he scorned women.  Among his school-fellows he made a bad choice of comrades.  Though muscular and of tolerable health, he was physically, as well as morally, a coward.  Games and sports had I no attraction for him; he shut himself up in rooms, and read a great deal, yet even this, it seemed, not without an eye to winning admiration.

Brains he had —­ brains undeniably; but for a long time there was the greatest doubt as to what use he could make of them.  Harvey remembered the day when it was settled that he should study medicine.  He resolved upon it merely because he had chanced to hear the Doctor say that he was not cut out for that.

He saw himself at twenty, a lank, ungainly youth, with a disagreeable complexion and a struggling moustache.  He was a student at Guy’s; he had ‘diggings’; he tasted the joy of independence.  As is the way with young men of turbid passions and indifferent breeding, he rapidly signalised his independence by plunging into sordid slavery.  A miserable time to think of; a wilderness of riot, folly, and shame.  Yet it seemed to him that he was enjoying life.  Among the rowdy set of his fellow-students he shone with a certain superiority.  His contempt of money, and his large way of talking about it, conveyed the impression that abundant means awaited him.  He gave away coin as readily as he spent it on himself; not so much in a true spirit of generosity (though his character had gleams of it), as because he dreaded above all things the appearance of niggardliness and the suspicion of a shallow purse.