of doors. Before Dominic they were of few words; but became eloquent
enough, in sonorous foreign speech, as his ears testified when he was
banished from their rather electric presence to the solitude of the
nursery above. And so it came about that a sense of mystery, of large
issues, of things at once strong and hidden, impenetrable to his
understanding and concerning which no questions might be asked, encircled
Dominic's childhood and passed into the very fabric of his thought. While
through it all his mother moved, to him tender and wholly exquisite, but
with the reticence of some deep-seated enthusiasm silently cherished,
some far-reaching alarm silently endured, always upon her. And this
resulted in an atmosphere of seriousness and responsibility which
inevitably reacted on the boy, making him sober beyond his years,
tempering his natural vivacity with watchfulness, and pitching even his
laughter in a minor key.

Only many years later, when after his mother's death it became his duty
to read letters exchanged between his parents during this period, did
Dominic Iglesias touch the key to the riddle, and fully measure the
public danger, the private strain and stress which had surrounded his
childhood and early youth. For his father, a man of far from ignoble
nature, but of narrow outlook and undying hatreds, was deeply involved in
revolutionary intrigue of the most advanced type--a victim of that false
passion of humanity which takes its rise not in honest desire for the
welfare of mankind, but in blind rebellion against all forms of
authority. His self-confidence was colossal; all rule being abominable to
him--save his own--all rulers hideous, save himself. The anarchist,
rightly understood, is merely the autocrat, the tyrant, turned inside
out. And this man, as Dominic gathered from the perusal of those old
letters, to whom the end so justified the means that red-handed crime
took on the fair colours of virtue, his mother had loved, even while she