Withington Chase was a fine old Jacobean mansion, which had been added to from time to time as whim or necessity had dictated.

The walls of the original structure were composed of small red bricks, relieved at frequent intervals, as far as the main frontage was concerned, by fluted pilasters of white stone with Ionic capitals, which, when seen from a little distance, had all the effect of marble. However incongruous and out of keeping with the general scheme of the house the various additions which had been patched on to it during the course of the last two centuries might have seemed when they were crude and new, Time\'s chastening fingers had mellowed them to a certain degree of beauty, so that in these latter days the general effect was that of a harmonious and homogeneous whole.

Originally there had been a much older mansion, which, after having been partially destroyed by fire, had been razed to the ground, all of it save one sturdy fragment which, for some unknown reason, had been allowed to stand.

This relic of a state of things long vanished was an octagonal tower, about sixty feet in height, built of undressed blocks of grey stone, held together by a mortar as hard as themselves. The interior of the tower consisted of three small rooms, one above the other, with a leaded roof surmounted by a breast-high parapet. Each of the rooms was lighted by a couple of long narrow openings in the wall, which at one time might have been glazed, but were so no longer. Of these rooms the ground floor one alone was now put to any service, access to the others, owing to the rotten state of the woodwork, being deemed a risk not worth adventuring. The basement in question was used as a receptacle for gardeners\' tools, and a general storage place for things horticultural, which had been allowed to accumulate there for years.

As already stated, the tower had formed a part of the older mansion of Withington Chase, although what the intention had been in building it, and to what special purposes it had been put, nobody nowadays seemed to know. There it was, however; and there--the elements being its only enemies--it was likely to remain for some centuries to come. It was about five or six hundred yards apart from the more modern mansion, the space between the two being occupied by the belt of timber before mentioned.

The main entrance to Withington Chase was approached by a broad carriage-drive, which swept with a graceful curve from the lodge some half a mile away. The park was well timbered, and contained a number of grand old trees said to have been planted before the present mansion was in existence. In front of the house, but intersected by the drive, was a spacious expanse of closely-shaven lawn, to the right of which was a small but choicely kept flower-garden, while on its left was a shrubbery of tall clipped hedges and thick clumps of evergreens, among the sheltered paths of which Sir Gilbert found it pleasant to take his constitutional when the weather was too cold and raw to allow of his walking elsewhere in the open air.

The master of Withington Chase was proud of his long descent, and that not without reason.

He could trace back his pedigree on the male side in unbroken sequence to the time of Henry IV. One head of the family had fought at Agincourt, another had distinguished himself at Malplaquet; while scions of the family, more than one could count on one\'s fingers, had fought and, in several cases, died for their king and country wherever the British flag had penetrated. Quite a number of Clares had been in Parliament from time to time, and if none of them had been noted for his eloquence, or had risen to office, they had all possessed the negative virtue of being staunch voters, men whose political opinions could be relied upon never to stray beyond the hard and fast lines laid down by their own party.

The present baronet had taken no share in public affairs, and had declined more than once to allow himself to be nominated for a seat in Parliament. An occasional appearance on the magisterial bench, which grew still more occasional with advancing years, just sufficed to remind his brother justices and the good folk of Mapleford, that Sir Gilbert Clare of Withington Chase had not yet been gathered to his ancestors in the family vault.

Sir Gilbert, at the age of five-and-twenty, had inherited an impoverished estate, and, by consequence, a diminished revenue.

His father had been a man of fashion and a gamester, under the Regency, and in the course of a few years of reckless expenditure had contrived to undo the work of several generations of thrifty progenitors. This was a state of things which the young baronet at once set himself to remedy. The town house and its contents were sold to the highest bidder; the Yorkshire property was let on lease to a wealthy manufacturer; while the Withington establishment was cut down to the lowest limits compatible with keeping up his station in the county.

Unfortunately for his worldly prospects--and he was the first to admit the fact later on--Sir Gilbert had married about a year prior to his father\'s death, and, little likely as one would have deemed him, with his cold temperament, to commit such an imprudence, had married for love. His bride had come of a good family, but beyond a trifling dowry of a few thousand pounds, had had nothing save a pretty face, and a piquant manner to recommend her. Such as she was, however, she had contrived to fascinate the haughty young heir of Withington Chase.

Alas! that it should have to be told, but in the course of a few brief years after marriage the pretty face had become a memory of the past, and the piquant manner had degenerated into the querulous repinings of a semi-invalid; for Lady Clare was one of those women who find in a naturally delicate constitution an ample excuse for shirking all the active duties of life, and for coddling themselves into a state of chronic invalidism, the chief features of which, in her case, seemed to be reclining the day through on a couch, and being waited on, hand and foot, by everyone about her.

Under these circumstances it was scarcely to be wondered at that, after a time, Sir Gilbert\'s home-life became intolerable to him. He was by nature of a restless disposition, with a strong inclination for travel and adventure, and by degrees his absences from the Chase grew longer, till at length it came to pass that he would be away for several months at a time.

It was during one of these absences that his wife died, greatly to his surprise and relief. She had so coddled herself up for years, and had made of herself such a hothouse plant, that a slight chill, too trivial in the first instance to seem worth notice, had sufficed to carry her off. She left behind her a son ten years old, the John Alexander Clare to whom we have already been introduced.

Whatever might have been Lady Clare\'s defects in other ways, she had passionately loved her child.

Unfortunately, however, not content with loving him, she had done her best to spoil him. This, Sir Gilbert\'s frequent absences had allowed her ample opportunities for doing. When he was at the Chase it was tacitly understood between mother and son that matters were on a different footing. At such times her ladyship curbed, in some measure, the display of her affection, and Alec left off bird-nesting and consorting with Martin Rigg, and attended assiduously at the rectory, where the Rev. Bruce Amor was doing his best to ground him in the humanities.

With his mother\'s death everything was changed for Alec.

Whether Sir Gilbert had all along been aware of the way in which his son was being spoiled, but had his own reasons for ignoring the fact, or whether some meddler had made it his business to enlighten him, the result was the same as far as the boy was concerned. In place of good, easy-going Mr. Amor, he was now put under the charge of a tutor whose reputation as a martinet had been his chief qualification in the eyes of the baronet. Mr. Duggan\'s instructions were to prepare the lad for a public school and in the meantime, as Sir Gilbert expressed it, to "break him in."

And now for Alec began an experience which was all the harder to bear by reason of what had gone before.

The new tutor was like a baleful shadow which dogged him wherever he went. From the time he rose till the time he went to bed he could never get rid of him for more than a few minutes at a time. It was a tyranny which at length became almost unbearable and went far towards breaking the lad\'s all but indomitable spirit.

One day, when he had been only a few weeks at the Chase, Mr. Duggan, with the view, perhaps, of keeping up his reputation as a martinet, chose, by way of punishment for some trifling fault, to administer a sound caning to his pupil. The lad took his punishment without a murmur, but half an hour later, he was missing; nor, when search came to be made, was he anywhere to be found.

Alec, however, was no great distance away.

Being nearly as active as a squirrel, he had climbed the bole of one of the big old trees in the park, and there, for two days and nights--the month being June--he lay perdu in his leafy shelter, being supplied with food meanwhile by Martin Rigg, who was the only person in the secret of his hiding-place. It was only his father\'s threat, conveyed to him by that faithful servitor, to send for Captain Darville\'s bloodhounds and so track him down, that induced him to give himself up.

For this freak he was sentenced to a week of bread-and-water in a darkened room. Even so, he was not left wholly forlorn, food and candles and books being surreptitiously conveyed to him from the servants\' hall. But Mr. Duggan never laid hands on him again.

In due course this period of his life came to an end, and it was with something of the feeling of a captive released after a long imprisonment that he one day found himself on his way to Harrow, from which place, in the natural sequence of things, he proceeded to Cambridge.

All his life Alec had stood in awe of his father. It was a feeling which, to some extent, had been fostered by his mother. To both of them it had been as a load lifted off their lives when the baronet left home on one of his excursions, and both had looked forward with dread to his return. There had been no cordiality, no sympathy, no rapprochement in any proper sense of the word, between father and son.

That, however, had been owing to no fault on the boy\'s part, for Alec\'s was one of those bright, open dispositions which respond readily to whatever kindly influences may be brought to bear on them. But Sir Gilbert had no liking for children, or young people, and it was not in his nature to make any exception even in the case of his own son. He had kept himself aloof from him from the first, and with the lapse of years the silent, passive breach between the two, if such it could be termed, grew gradually wider and more impossible of being bridged over. Many an hour\'s heartache had the boy, more especially after his mother\'s death, but there was too large a tincture of family pride in his composition to allow of even an inkling of what he felt to be visible on the surface. More than once in after-life he said bitterly to himself: "If when I was young, my father had treated me as other fathers treat their sons, I should have been a different man from what I am now."

That might, or might not, have been the case.

It was while Alec was at Harrow that Sir Gilbert married again.

There was no question of sentiment mixed up with his second matrimonial venture, as there had been with his first. It was the simple fact of Miss Delmayne being possessed of a fortune of sixty thousand pounds in her own right that led him to propose to her.

On her part, the lady, who had seen thirty summers, had no illusions. She was perfectly aware for what reason she was being sought, but, all the same, it seemed to her that she would have been very foolish to let slip the chance of becoming Lady Clare, of Withington Chase.

She was a capable, managing woman, who allowed her husband to go and come and do just as he liked, without any repining or questioning on her part--a mode of procedure which just suited the baronet. On the other hand, she tolerated no interference in domestic matters, or the indoor management of the Chase. It may be accounted as a virtue in her that she was no more inclined for an extravagant style of living than was her husband. Still more did this become the case after her three sons were born; indeed, for the sake of their future she began after a time to develop a disposition which, in a person of her social position, might almost be termed penurious.

Lady Clare\'s special grievance, and it was one which debarred her from seeking the sympathy of others--the one thorn in her pillow--was the existence of her husband\'s eldest son.

In that particular, if in no other, it seemed to her that Providence had dealt hardly with her. No such person ought to have been born; or, if that could not have been avoided, his sojourn in this vale of tears should have been of the briefest. To her it seemed a monstrous thing that anyone other than her own darling Randolph should be the legal heir to his father\'s title and estates. More especially hard did it seem to her in view of the fact that a third of the dowry she had brought her husband had gone to clear off certain old mortgages contracted by the preceding baronet, and in so far, might be said to have benefited the estate in perpetuity.

Yet, in the face of this, Randolph, at his father\'s death, would only be entitled to a younger son\'s share of the baronet\'s savings--provided there should be any to divide--both the Hertfordshire and the Yorkshire estates being strictly entailed. Her ladyship felt that she had indeed just cause for repining.

She was coldly gracious to Alec, whenever that young man made his appearance at the Chase, which, as time went on, became less frequently than ever. He felt that he was not wanted at home, that he had now become less to his father even than he had been before, and he knew that his instincts did not deceive him when they told him that in her ladyship he had an enemy whom no efforts on his part would avail to conciliate.

It was as well, perhaps, for more reasons than one, that Lady Clare had no knowledge of the considerable sums disbursed by the baronet from time to time in liquidation of the debts contracted by his spendthrift heir. In those matters Mr. Page, the family solicitor, was the only person taken into Sir Gilbert\'s confidence. It was a source of gratification to her ladyship to know that father and son lived on permanently bad terms with each other; and when, after that October night which saw the heir banished from home, her husband told her that Alec had gone abroad, and that they were not likely to be troubled with him or his affairs again for a long time to come, she sincerely rejoiced. Alec was wild and careless of his health, and reckless in many ways. There was no knowing what might come to pass. It no longer seemed to her the foolish daydream she had deemed it heretofore, that she might, perhaps, live to hear her son addressed as Sir Randolph Clare of Withington Chase.

It was well for her ladyship, as it is for all of us, that there was no invisible hand to draw aside the curtain of the future and reveal to her even a glimpse of what was to be.

Meanwhile, the real heir had unaccountably vanished from the haunts which had known him, and was as one dead to that little world in which he had been such a familiar figure. No word of him, or message of any kind reached his whilom associates. A vague rumour got spread about, originating no one seemed to know how or whence, that he had joined a certain exploring expedition which just then was being a good deal talked about; but it was a rumour which was never confirmed.

Men talked and wondered for a little while, and then presently he was forgotten.