Dinner over, Richard looked hurriedly at his watch, and said, with much briskness, “I shall just be in time, sir, if we walk.  Will you come with me to the station?”

The baronet did not answer.

Richard was going to repeat the question, but found his father’s eyes fixed on him so meaningly that he wavered, and played with his empty glass.

“I think we will have a little more claret,” said the baronet.

Claret was brought, and they were left alone.

The baronet then drew within arm’s-reach of his son, and began: 

“I am not aware what you may have thought of me, Richard, during the years we have lived together; and indeed I have never been in a hurry to be known to you; and, if I had died before my work was done, I should not have complained at losing half my reward, in hearing you thank me.  Perhaps, as it is, I never may.  Everything, save selfishness, has its recompense.  I shall be content if you prosper.”

He fetched a breath and continued:  “You had in your infancy a great loss.”  Father and son coloured simultaneously.  “To make that good to you I chose to isolate myself from the world, and devote myself entirely to your welfare; and I think it is not vanity that tells me now that the son I have reared is one of the most hopeful of God’s creatures.  But for that very reason you are open to be tempted the most, and to sink the deepest.  It was the first of the angels who made the road to hell.”

He paused again.  Richard fingered at his watch.

“In our House, my son, there is peculiar blood.  We go to wreck very easily.  It sounds like superstition; I cannot but think we are tried as most men are not.  I see it in us all.  And you, my son, are compounded of two races.  Your passions are violent.  You have had a taste of revenge.  You have seen, in a small way, that the pound of flesh draws rivers of blood.  But there is now in you another power.  You are mounting to the table-land of life, where mimic battles are changed to real ones.  And you come upon it laden equally with force to create and to destroy.”  He deliberated to announce the intelligence, with deep meaning:  “There are women in the world, my son!”

The young man’s heart galloped back to Raynham.

“It is when you encounter them that you are thoroughly on trial.  It is when you know them that life is either a mockery to you, or, as some find it, a gift of blessedness.  They are our ordeal.  Love of any human object is the soul’s ordeal; and they are ours, loving them, or not.”

The young man heard the whistle of the train.  He saw the moon-lighted wood, and the vision of his beloved.  He could barely hold himself down and listen.

“I believe,” the baronet spoke with little of the cheerfulness of belief, “good women exist.”

Oh, if he knew Lucy!