typical of the family which had inhabited it. The latter had declined
generation after generation, sending out now and again some abortive
shoot of unsatisfied energy in the shape of a soldier or sailor, who had
worked his way to the minor grades of the services and had there
stopped, cut short either from unheeding gallantry in action or from
that destroying cause to men without breeding or youthful care--the
recognition of a position above them which they feel unfitted to fill.
So, little by little, the family dropped lower and lower, the men
brooding and dissatisfied, and drinking themselves into the grave, the
women drudging at home, or marrying beneath them--or worse. In process
of time all disappeared, leaving only two in the Croft, Wykham Delandre
and his sister Margaret. The man and woman seemed to have inherited in
masculine and feminine form respectively the evil tendency of their
race, sharing in common the principles, though manifesting them in
different ways, of sullen passion, voluptuousness and recklessness.

The history of the Brents had been something similar, but showing the
causes of decadence in their aristocratic and not their plebeian forms.
They, too, had sent their shoots to the wars; but their positions had
been different and they had often attained honour--for without flaw they
were gallant, and brave deeds were done by them before the selfish
dissipation which marked them had sapped their vigour.

The present head of the family--if family it could now be called when
one remained of the direct line--was Geoffrey Brent. He was almost a
type of worn out race, manifesting in some ways its most brilliant
qualities, and in others its utter degradation. He might be fairly
compared with some of those antique Italian nobles whom the painters
have preserved to us with their courage, their unscrupulousness, their
refinement of lust and cruelty--the voluptuary actual with the fiend