She was such a curious mixture, pre-eminently womanly, tender, sympathetic, and, at the same time, tainted unmistakably with pronounced worldliness. Much as he had studied her, he felt quite unequal to gauging her character.

Once he had heard some woman declare that Camilla was "insincere." He had felt a wholly unreasonable amount of anger against that woman. And yet he was quite unprepared to defend her this morning against such an accusation.

He had suffered, really suffered, when he had seen her with Broxbourne. It was inconceivable to him that a woman so delicately fashioned as she mentally (though not supremely intelligent, her mind had a tendency to poetry and charm evinced unconsciously a score of times) could find pleasure in the society of this young man with his rough voice, his sporting look, his peculiar manners. Nevertheless, she had laughed and sparkled and met Sir Samuel with all the ease and intimacy of a comrade.

"It is because she is alone, because she has no one to lead her," he said to himself as he sat in the train whirling to town. But ponder as he might, he could offer to himself nothing convincing or satisfying where Camilla Lancing was concerned. All he knew was that no matter how his mind might busy itself with other thoughts, it always circled back to Camilla in some fashion or other.

As he drew nearer to the smoke and the fog of the great city he closed his eyes and dreamed of the day before—of that wide expanse of restless, sun-kissed sea, with the sky fading in the distance into a glorious sweep of gold and purple and grey.

In his imagination he could hear again the break of the waves on the wet beach mingling with the musical hum of the car, and he could feel once again that sense of delight, almost of possessive delight, as he had looked back ever and anon and had met the smile of Camilla's sweet eyes and pensive lips.

She seemed to be cut away from him altogether by this darkness and heavy atmosphere.

The yellow gloom fell like a pall on all that was bright and beautiful and desirable.

He longed to go back to the country; above all, he longed to see her again, and quickly.

CHAPTER III

When he reached his mother's house in Kensington, Rupert Haverford was met with the information that Mrs. Baynhurst had left town the preceding day.

The house was all shut up, and the servant who opened the door to him wore no apron or cap.

He passed into the hall thoroughly vexed.

Of course by this time he ought to have been well prepared for any startling move on the part of his mother, who never by any chance did those things that were expected of her, or, indeed, anything that she had announced she intended doing.

He put the parlourmaid through a cross-examination.

"I came up from the country on purpose," he said to her, naturally irritated. "I understood from a letter that was sent on from my house that my mother had had an accident, and that she was anything but well!"

"No more she is, sir," said the maid. "Dr. Mortlock, he was quite angry when he come here this morning and found Mrs. Baynhurst gone; but there was a letter come yesterday from Mr. Cuthbert, saying as he was ill in Paris, and the mistress she fussed herself into a fever, and wouldn't rest satisfied, so she left last night. She wasn't no more fit to travel than this doormat, sir. You see, there was all but a smash up with the brougham."

Rupert Haverford was frowning sharply.

"Who is with my mother?" he asked.

"She's took Stebbings, her maid that is, sir, but not Miss Graniger. Most probable she'll have to join Mrs. Baynhurst in a day or two."

The maid rambled on loquaciously, and Rupert Haverford quickly gathered that his mother must have had a nasty shock, as her carriage had apparently just escaped collision with a runaway cab. She was not a nervous or a timid woman, far from it; but of late she had been in anything but good health, and this journey to Paris appeared to Haverford not merely an altogether needless fatigue, but a very foolish undertaking on her part.

In all probability his half-brother's serious illness would signify nothing more than an ordinary cold.

It was so typical of Cuthbert Baynhurst to write in a sensational way about himself; equally typical of their mother to take immediate alarm when any such news reached her.

It relieved Rupert Haverford to be angry with his half-brother now. He had made it a principle never to be angry with his mother. It was so useless. She was a strange creature was Rupert's mother. In a sense they were nothing more than acquaintances, for she had left his father when he had been a baby of a few months.

Octavia Marling had married John Haverford in a hurry, and had regretted the haste almost immediately.

Their life together had been unsupportable. It would, however, have been a very unusual kind of man who would have found life possible with a woman of her peculiar temperament and mental attributes, even in the most easy-going circumstances, and when such a woman was boxed down into the narrow limits of a struggling existence passed in a dull, smoke-grimed, small provincial town, the result was inevitable.

Rupert's father had adored his wife, but he could not live with her.

She was a brilliant woman, a woman with the brains, the will, the tenacious strength of a man, a woman who made rules for herself, and quietly and firmly rebelled against the position which tradition and nature had allotted to her sex.

When she had borne a child she had felt humiliated; motherhood was a natural evil, she admitted so much, but there were women created specially for the purpose, and she was assuredly not one of those women. She put the baby away from her as she put other objectionable things, and fell back on her work with new and deeper intentions.

She had been engaged, at the time when poor little Rupert came into the world, on an historical work of some magnitude, a work which entailed a considerable amount of research—indeed, which demanded that she should move about from one country to another, untrammelled by ties of any sort.

Perhaps the kindest letter she ever wrote to her husband was the one he received after she had left him. She was so unutterably glad to be free; to put the factory town, with its troops of working men and women clattering on the rough stones past the window where she worked, far, far behind her; to be liberated from the fretting duties and small events in her husband's professional life; to feel that miles and miles stretched between her and the clang of the factory bell and the ever-whirring noise of the restless machinery....

She only saw Rupert at a few odd times during the years that stretched between his birth and his father's death. And she was abroad when John Haverford died.

By his father's will the boy was left to the joint care of his mother and of a man called Matthew Woolgar.

No one knew where to find Mrs. Haverford, so the charge of the lad passed into the hands of this Woolgar, who accepted the trust in a very grudging spirit.

He was an ignorant, churlish man who had worked his way up from the gutter to the command of enormous wealth; a man whose very name was a curse in the ears of the men who served him; a man who was both feared and hated, and credited truly with being the hardest taskmaster in the world. It was asserted by many that the foundation of Woolgar's fortune lay in usury—money lent to his fellow-workers at an enormous rate of interest—but whether this was true or not no one knew. All that was certain was that he owned more than half the town and ruled with the hand of a tyrant.

John Haverford had written down his wishes as to his boy's education and profession, but Matthew Woolgar sneered these wishes into thin air.

A pauper had no right to the training of a prince.

Without waiting to consult Octavia Haverford, he took matters