’Tis law as stedfast as the throne of Zeus —

Our days are heritors of days gone by.’

AESCHYLUS: Agamemnon.

A LITTLE after five o’clock that day, Harold arrived at Transome Court. As he was winding along the broad road of the park, some parting gleams of the March sun pierced the trees here and there, and threw on the grass a long shadow of himself and the groom riding, and illuminated a window or two of the home he was approaching. But the bittemess in his mind made these sunny gleams almost as odious as an artificial smile. He wished he had never come back to this pale English sunshine.

In the course of his eighteen miles’ drive, he had made up his mind what he would do. He understood now, as he had never understood before, the neglected solitariness of his mother’s life, the allusions and innuendoes which had come out during the election. But with a proud insurrection against the hardship of an ignominy which was not of his own making, he inwardly said, that if the circumstances of his birth were such as to warrant any man in regarding his character of gentleman with ready suspicion, that character should be the more strongly asserted in his conduct. No one should be able to allege with any show of proof that he had inherited meanness.

As he stepped from the carriage and entered the hall, there were the voice and the trotting feet of little Harry as usual, and the rush to clasp his father’s leg and make his joyful puppy-like noises. Harold just touched the boy’s head, and then said to Dominic in a weary voice —

‘Take the child away. Ask where my mother is.’

Mrs Transome, Dominic said, was upstairs. He had seen her go up after coming in from her walk with Miss Lyon, and she had not come down again.

Harold, throwing off his hat and greatcoat, went straight to his mother’s dressing-room. There was still hope in his mind. He might be suffering simply from a lie. There is much misery created in the world by mere mistake or slander, and he might have been s............