design that the last Lord of Orven should any more hide from the world
the guilty secret of his race. It was the will of the gods--and he
betrayed himself. "Return," he writes, "the beginning of the end is
come." What end?

_The_ end--perfectly well known to Randolph, needing no explanation for
_him_. The old, old end, which in the ancient dim time led the first
lord, loyal still at heart, to forsake his king; and another, still
devout, to renounce his cherished faith, and yet another to set fire to
the home of his ancestors. You have called the two last scions of the
family "a proud and selfish pair of beings"; proud they were, and
selfish too, but you are in error if you think their selfishness a
personal one: on the contrary, they were singularly oblivious of self
in the ordinary sense of the word. Theirs was the pride and the
selfishness of _race_. What consideration, think you, other than the
weal of his house, could induce Lord Randolph to take on himself the
shame--for as such he certainly regards it--of a conversion to
radicalism? He would, I am convinced, have _died_ rather than make this
pretence for merely personal ends. But he does it--and the reason? It
is because he has received that awful summons from home; because "the
end" is daily coming nearer, and it must not find him unprepared to
meet it; it is because Lord Pharanx's senses are becoming _too_ acute;
because the clatter of the servants' knives at the other end of the
house inflames him to madness; because his excited palate can no longer
endure any food but the subtlest delicacies; because Hester Dyett is
able from the posture in which he sits to conjecture that he is
intoxicated; because, in fact, he is on the brink of the dreadful
malady which physicians call "_General Paralysis of the Insane_." You
remember I took from your hands the newspaper containing the earl's
letter to Cibras, in order to read it with my own eyes. I had my