It was not a very easy task,” Kathleen found opportunity to say to Christian, half an hour later, as the family were assembling in his library. They stood together by the window nearest the table, and watched the embarrassed deportment of Lord Lingfield under the conversational attentions of Cora, as they talked in low tones.

“But she is here in the Castle: that is the principal thing.” He did not shrink now from the implication of his words.

“Yes, she finally consented to come,” explained the other. “I told her that you insisted upon it—and then—then I used some persuasion of my own.”

“I thank you, Kathleen,” he said, simply. “It seems that she is to write an account of the funeral for some London newspaper. She said frankly, however, that that of itself did not account for her coming. It will pay her expenses—so she said—but the paper would not have sent her specially. And there is no doubt about it—she was really annoyed at being discovered.”

The solicitors from Shrewsbury, entering the room now, gave at once an official air to everything. The elder of them, with oppressive formality, drew a formidable parchment from a bag held by his junior, and bowed elaborately to Christian. Then, as if he had received some mandate to do so from His Grace, he untied the tape, and cleared his throat. Those who had been seated, rose to their feet.

The will came to them unaltered from 1859—and contained, wrapped in a surprising deal of pompous verbiage, a solitary kernel of essential fact. No legatee was mentioned save an impersonal being called the heir-at-law. The absolutism of dynastic rule contemplated no distribution or division of power. This slender, dark-eyed young man, standing with head inclined and a nervous hand upon the table, had not come into being until long after that will was made, and for other long years thereafter his very existence had been unknown to the family at large. Yet, as the lawyer’s reading ended, there he stood before their gaze, the unquestioned autocrat.

“This may be the best time to say it.” Christian straightened himself, and addressed his family for the first time, with a grave smile, and a voice which was behaving itself better than he feared it would. “There are no minor bequests, owing to the circumstances under which the will was drawn, but I have taken it upon myself to supply such omissions, in this matter, as shall commend themselves to my consideration. Upon this subject we may speak among ourselves at our leisure, later on.” With distinguished self-possession he looked at his watch. “I think luncheon is at two.”

There followed here an unrehearsed, and seemingly unpremeditated, episode. Lord Julius advanced with impressive gravity across the little open space, and taking the hand which Christian impulsively extended to him, bent over it in a formal and courtly bow. When Emanuel, following his father, did the same, it was within the consciousness of all that they had become committed to a new ceremonial rite. Kathleen, coming behind her husband, gave her cheek to be kissed by the young chief of her adopted clan—and this action translated itself into a precedent as well.

Edward and Augustine, after the hesitation of an awkward instant, came forward together, and in their turn, with a flushed stiffness of deportment, made their salutation to the head of the house. To them, conjointly, Christian said something in a whisper. He kissed Cora upon each cheek, with a faint smile in his eyes at her preference for the foreign method. His remoter cousins, the Earl of Chobham and Lord Lingfield, passed before him, and he vaguely noted the reservation expressed in their lifeless palms and frigid half-bow. They seemed to wish to differentiate themselves from the others—to express to him the Pickwickian character of their homage. They were not Torrs; they did not salaam to him as their over-lord. They had a rival dynasty of their own, and their appearance here involved nothing but the seemly courtesy of distant relationship. He perceived in a dim way that this was what their manner was saying to him—but it scarcely diverted his attention. His glance and his thoughts passed over their heads, to fasten upon the remaining figure.

Lady Cressage, unlike the other two women, had retained the bonnet and heavy veil of mourning. The latter she held drawn aside with a black-gloved hand as she approached. It flashed suddenly across Christian’s brain that the year of her mourning for her own dead was not over—yet in her own house she wore gay laces and light colors. But it was unkind to remember this—and senseless, too. He strove to revivify, instead, the great compassionate impulse which formerly she had stirred within him. A pallid shadow of it was all that he could conjure up—and in the chill of this shadow he touched her white temple with his lips, and she moved away. There lingered in his mind a curious, passive conflict of memories as to whether their eyes had met or not. Then this yielded place to the impression some detached organ of perception had formed for him, that in that somber setting of crape her face had looked too small for the rest of her figure.

Then, as the whole subject melted from his mind, he turned toward the two young men who, upon his whispered request, had remained in the library after the departure of the others. He looked at his watch, and beckoned them forward with a friendly wave of his hand.

“Pray come and sit down,” he said, with affability upon the surface of his tone. “We have a quarter of an hour, and I felt that it could not be put to better use than in relieving your minds a little—or trying to do so. Let me begin by saying that I do not think I have met either of you before. In fact, now that I reflect, I am sure that we have not met before. I am glad to see you both.”

The two brothers had drawn near, and settled uneasily into the very chairs which Lord Julius and Emanuel had occupied some hours before. Again Christian half seated himself upon the corner of the table, but this time he swung his leg lightly as he surveyed his guests. It flattered his prophetic judgment to note that Augustine seemed the first to apprehend the meaning of his words, but that Edward, upon pondering them, appeared the more impressed by their magnanimity. Between them, as they regarded him and each other doubtfully, the family likeness was more striking than ever. Christian remembered having heard somewhere that their father, Lord Edward, had been a dark man, as a Torr should be. Their flaxen hair and dull blue eyes must come from that unmentionable mother of theirs, who was living in indefinite obscurity—if she was living at all—upon the blackmail Julius paid her for not using the family name. The thought somehow put an added gentleness into his voice.

“How old are you—Eddy?” he asked, forcing himself into the use of the diminutive as a necessary part of the patriarchal rÔle he had assumed.

“Nine-and-twenty in October,” answered the Captain, poutingly. It seemed on the tip of his tongue to add something else, but he did not.

“There’s two years and a month between us,” remarked Augustine, with more buoyancy.

“And you’ve been out of the army for five years,” pursued Christian. “It seems that you became a Captain very early. Would there be any chance of your taking it up again, where you left off?”

Edward shook his head. “It couldn’t be done twice. I got it by a lucky fluke—a friend of my father’s, you know. But they’re deuced stiff now,” he answered. “You have to do exams and things. An old johnnie asks you what bounds Peru on the northeast, and if you can’t remember just at the minute, why, you get chucked. Out you go, d’ye see?”

“What is your idea, then? What would you like to do?”

Captain Edward knitted his scanty, pale brows over this question, and regarded the prospect through the window in frowning perplexity. “Oh, almost anything,” he remarked at last, vacuously.

Christian permitted himself the comment of a smiling sniff. “Think it over,” he said, and directed his glance at the younger brother. “You’re in Parliament,” he observed, with a slight difference in tone. “I’m not sure that I quite understand-What is it that attracts you in a—in a Parliamentary career?”

Augustine lifted his pale, scanty brows in surprise. The right kind of answer did not come readily to him. “Well,” he began with hesitation—“there was that seat in Cheshire where we still had a good bit of land—and Julius didn’t object—and I had an idea it would help me in the City.” He recovered confidence as he went on. “But it is pretty well played out now, I came in too late. The Kaffir boom spoiled the whole show. Five years ago an M P. could pick and choose; I knew fellows who were on twenty boards at a time, and big blocks of stock were flying about them like—like hailstones. But you can’t do that now. M. P.s are as cheap as dirt; they won’t have ’em at any price. A fellow hardly makes his cab-fares in the City nowadays. And even if you get the very best inside tips, brokers have got so fearfully nasty about your margins being covered——”

“Oh, well,” interposed Christian, “it isn’t necessary that we should go into all that. I do not like to hear about the City. If you get money for yourself there, you have taken it away from somebody else. I would rather that people of our name kept away from such things.”

“If you come to that, everybody’s money is taken from somebody else,” said Edward, unexpectedly entering the conversation. His brother checked him with a monitory hand on his arm. “No, you don’t understand,” Augustine warned him. “I quite see what the Duke means.”

“If you see what I mean,” returned Christian, quietly, “perhaps you will follow the rest that I have to say; Do you care very much about remaining in Parliament?” Augustine’s face reflected an eager mental effort to get at his august interlocutor’s meaning. “Well—that’s so hard to say,” he began, anxiously. “There are points about it, of course—but then—when you look at it in another way, why of course——”

“My idea is this,” Christian interposed once more. “I hope you won’t mind my saying it—but there seems to me something rather ridiculous about your being in the House. Parliament ought not to be treated as a joke, or a convenience. It is a place for men who will work hard in the service of the country, and who have the tastes and the information and the judgment and the patriotic devotion to make their work of value to their country. I dare say that there are members who do not entirely measure up to this standard, but after all there is a standard, and I do not like to be a party to lowering it. England has claims upon us Torrs; it deserves something better at our hands than that. So I think I would like you to consider the idea of resigning your seat—or at least, dropping out at the end of this Parliament. Or no—that would be waiting too long. You would better think of retiring now.”

“Do you mean that I am to stand for the seat, instead?” asked Edward, looking up with awakened interest.

Christian stared, then sighed smilingly and shook his head.

“No, that doesn’t seem to have been in my mind,” he replied with gentleness. He contemplated the elder brother afresh.

“Have you thought yet what you would like to do?” he asked again, almost with geniality.

“How d’ye mean ‘do’?” inquired Edward, with a mutinous note in his voice. “Is it something about a business? If you ask me straight, I’m not so fearfully keen about doin’ anything. No fellow wants to do things, if he can rub along without.”

Christian found himself repressing a gay chuckle with effort. He had not dreamed he should like this one of his kinsmen so much.

“No—no; you shall not do things,” he promised him, with a sparkling eye. “That would be too bad.”

Captain Edward turned in his chair, and recrossed his legs. “It’s a trifle awkward, all this, you know,” he declared, with an impatient scowl. “It doesn’t suit me to be made game of. You’ve got the whip hand, and you can give me things or not, as you like, and I’ve got to be civil and take what you offer, because I can’t help myself—but damn me if I like to be chaffed into the bargain! I wouldn’t do it to you, d’ye see, if it was the other way about.”

Christian’s face lapsed into instant gravity. A fleeting speculation as to that problematical reversal of positions rose in his mind, but he put it away. “Ah, you mustn’t think that,” he urged, with serious tones. “No, Cousin Edward, this is what I want to say to you.” And then, all unbidden, the things he really wished to say, yet which he had not thought of before, ranged themselves in his mind.

“Listen to me,” he went on. “You have been a soldier. You were a soldier when you were a very young man. Now, you had an uncle who was also a soldier when he was a mere youth—a very loyal and distinguished soldier, too. He died a soldier when he was in his fortieth year—far away from his family, from his wife and son, and much farther away still from the place and country of his birth. Once, in his youth, he was mixed up in an unpleasant and even disgraceful affair. How much to blame he personally was—that I do not know. It was very long ago—and he was so young a man—really I refuse to consider the question. I could insist to myself that he was innocent—if I felt that it mattered at all, one way or the other—and if I did not feel that by doing so, somehow he would not be then so real a figure to me as he is now. And he is very real to me; he has been so all my life.”

He paused, with a momentary break in his voice, to blink the tears from his eyes. It was not ducal, but he put the back of his hand to his cheeks, and dried them.

“I show you how it affects me,” he continued, simply. “No matter what he did in some stupid hour in London, he was a brave soldier before that, and after that. He fought for many losing causes; he died fighting for one which was most hopeless of all. I am proud that I am his son. I am proud for you, that you are his nephew. And something has occurred to me that I think you will like to do—for me and for him. When I stood to-day over our vault—where we are all buried—it cut me to the heart to remember that one of us lies alone, a great way off—in a strange land by himself. I propose to you that you go to Spain for me—it is at Seo de Urgel, in the mountain country of the Catalans—and that you find his grave, and that you bring him back here to sleep with his people. He would not return in his lifetime—but I think he would be pleased with us for bringing him back now.”

Edward had looked fixedly up at his cousin, then glanced away, then allowed his blank gaze to return, the while these words were being spoken. It was impossible to gather from his reddened, immobile face, now, any notion of their effect upon him. But after a moment’s pause, he rose to his feet, squared his shoulders and put out his hand to Christian.

“Quite right; I’ll go,” he said, abruptly.

The two men shook hands, with a sense of magnetic communion which could have amazed no one more than themselves. Then, under a recurring consciousness of embarrassed constraint, they turned away from each other, and Edward wandered off awkwardly toward the door.

“Oh—a moment more,” called Christian, with a step in his cousin’s direction. Then on second thoughts he added: “Or shall we let that wait? I will see you again—some time to-day or to-morrow. Yes—leave me now for a minute with your brother.”

When the door had closed upon Edward, Christian turned slowly to Augustine, and, as he leaned once more against the table, regarded him with a ruminating scrutiny.

“I am puzzled about you,” he remarked, thoughtfully.

Augustine returned the gaze with visible perturbation.

“I think,” pursued Christian, “that it rather annoys me that you don’t tell me to puzzle and be damned.”

The other took the words with a grimace, and an unhappy little laugh. He, too, rose to his feet. “I funked it,” he said with rueful candor.

“Well, don’t funk things with me,” Christian advised him, with a testiness of which, upon the instant, he was ashamed. “Look here,” he continued, less brusquely, “I could take it from your brother that he did not want to do things. That fits him: he is not the kind of man to apply himself in that way. But I have the feeling that you are different. There ought to be performance—capacity—of some sort in you, if I could only get to know what it is. You are only my age. Isn’t there something that particularly appeals to you?”

Augustine balanced himself meditatively upon his heels. “You say you bar the City”—he remarked with caution. “Would you have any objection to Johannesburg? It’s not what it was, by any means, but it’s bound to pick up again. I might do myself very well there—with a proper start.”

“But you are thinking always of money!” broke in Christian, sharply once again. “Suppose that there was no question of money—suppose, what shall I say? that you had twelve hundred a year, secure to you without any effort of your own—what would you do then?”

This seemed very simple to Augustine. “I would do whatever you wanted me to do,” he replied, with fervor.

Christian shrugged his shoulders, and dismissed him with a gesture. “We will speak again about it,” he said coldly, and turned away.

Descending the great staircase a few minutes later, Christian entered the door which Barlow had been waiting to open for him—and made his first public appearance as the dispenser of Caermere’s hospitality.

The guests, after the old mid-day fashion of the place, were already for the most part gathered in the large dining-hall, and stood or sat in groups upon the side pierced by the tall windows. These guests did not dissemble the interest with which they from time to time directed glances across to the other side, where a long table, laid for luncheon, put in evidence a grateful profusion of cold joints and made-dishes.

A pleased rustle of expectancy greeted Christian’s advent, but it seemed that this did not, for the moment at least, involve food and drink. He strolled over to the company, and, as he exchanged words here and there, kept an attentive eye busy in taking stock of its composition. There were some forty persons present, of whom three-fourths, apparently, were county people. A few casual presentations forced themselves upon him, but the names of the new acquaintances established no foothold in his memory. He smiled and murmured words which he hoped were seasonable—but all the while he was scanning the assemblage with a purpose of his own.

At last he came to Kathleen, and was able to have a private word in her ear. “I do not see her anywhere,” he whispered.

“I could not prevail upon her to come in to lunch,” she answered; “I imagine it is partly a question of clothes. But she is being looked out for. And afterward I will take charge of her again, if you like—though——”

The sentence remained unfinished, as she took the arm Christian offered her, at Barlow’s eloquent approach.