"The more sweetly shall your mother be avenged," cried the
other, and again his eyes blazed with that unhealthy,
fanatical light. "What fitter than the hand of that poor
lady's son to pull your father down in ruins?" He laughed
short and fiercely. "It seldom chances in this world that
justice is done so nicely."

"You hate him very deeply," said Mr. Caryll pensively, and the
look in his eyes betrayed the trend of his thoughts; they were
of pity -but of pity at the futility of such strong emotions.

"As deeply as I loved your mother, Justin." The sharp, rugged
features of that seared old face seemed of a sudden
transfigured and softened. The wild eyes lost some of their
glitter in a look of wistfulness, as he pondered a moment the
one sweet memory in a wasted life, a life wrecked over thirty
years ago - wrecked wantonly by that same Ostermore of whom
they spoke, who had been his friend.

A groan broke from his lips. He took his head in his hands,
and, elbows on the table, he sat very still a moment,
reviewing as in a flash the events of thirty and more years
ago, when he and Viscount Rotherby - as Ostermore was then -
had been young men at the St. Germain's Court of James II.

It was on an excursion into Normandy that they had met
Mademoiselle de Maligny, the daughter of an impoverished
gentleman of the chetive noblesse of that province. Both had
loved her. She had preferred - as women will - the outward
handsomeness of Viscount Rotherby to the sounder heart and