paid unless the new lord was at hand.


II.

Mrs Sandryl-Kempton sat before the fire in her wide, airy, faded
drawing-room, and thought of the Theodore Vellan of old days, and
wondered what the present Lord Vellan would be like. She had got a
note from him that morning, despatched from Southampton the day
before, announcing, 'I shall be in town to-morrow--at Bowden's Hotel,
in Cork Street,' and asking when he might come to her. She had
answered by telegraph, 'Come and dine at eight to-night,' to which he
had wired back an acceptance. Thereupon, she had told her son that he
must dine at his club; and now she was seated before her fire, waiting
for Theodore Vellan to arrive, and thinking of thirty years ago.

She was a bride then, and her husband, her brother Paul, and Theodore
Vellan were bound in a league of ardent young-mannish friendship, a
friendship that dated from the time when they had been undergraduates
together at Oxford. She thought of the three handsome, happy,
highly-endowed young men, and of the brilliant future she had foreseen
for each of them: her husband at the Bar, her brother in the Church,
and Vellan--not in politics, she could never understand his political
aspirations, they seemed quite at odds with the rest of his
character--but in literature, as a poet, for he wrote verse which she
considered very unusual and pleasing. She thought of this, and then
she remembered that her husband was dead, that her brother was dead,
and that Theodore Vellan had been dead to his world, at all events,
for thirty years. Not one of them had in any way distinguished
himself; not one had in any measure fulfilled the promise of his