with the prick-eared knaves! God and King Charles!" These were the
last words he spoke.

Cyril had done all that was necessary. He had laid by more than half
his earnings for the last eight or nine months. One of his clients,
an undertaker, had made all the necessary preparations for the
funeral, and in a few hours his father would be borne to his last
resting-place. As he stood at the open window he thought sadly over
the past, and of his father's wasted life. Had it not been for the
war he might have lived and died a country gentleman. It was the war,
with its wild excitements, that had ruined him. What was there for
him to do in a foreign country, without resource or employment,
having no love for reading, but to waste his life as he had done? Had
his wife lived it might have been different. Cyril had still a vivid
remembrance of his mother, and, though his father had but seldom
spoken to him of her, he knew that he had loved her, and that, had
she lived, he would never have given way to drink as he had done of
late years.

To his father's faults he could not be blind; but they stood for
nothing now. He had been his only friend, and of late they had been
drawn closer to each other in their loneliness; and although scarce a
word of endearment had passed between them, he knew that his father
had cared for him more than was apparent in his manner.

A few hours later, Sir Aubrey Shenstone was laid to rest in a little
graveyard outside the city walls. Cyril was the only mourner; and
when it was over, instead of going back to his lonely room, he turned
away and wandered far out through the fields towards Hampstead, and
then sat himself down to think what he had best do. Another three or