"It was for that reason I was almost coward enough not to remonstrate." Gwynne scratched a match several times before he succeeded in getting a light. "Nevertheless, I meant it." "Don't doubt it. And I am sorry--it is about the only regret I shall take with me, that and some remorse on account of the girls. I suppose Strathland will throw them a bone each--" "I will look out for them. But you are not bent on this horror!" he burst out. Wild plans of drugging his cousin, of locking him up, chased through his mind, and at the same time he was sick with the certainty of his own impotence. He knew his cousin, and he had the sensation that an illuminated scroll of fate dangled before his eyes. Zeal nodded. His excitement, his fears, had left him. He felt something of the swagger in calm peculiar to the condemned in their final hour, that last great rally of the nerves to feed the fires of courage. He finished his cigarette and flung himself on the sofa. "Wake me at twenty to seven, will you?" he asked. "I have ordered the trap." XVI The young Marquess of Strathland and Zeal sat alone in the smoking-room at Capheaton--the guests, with the exception of Flora Thangue and Isabel Otis had departed six days ago--sunk in a melancholy so profound that his brain was mercifully inactive: if the history of the past week was dully insistent the future was not. He had witnessed the descent of his grandfather and cousin into the vault of the chapel at Strathland Abbey two days before, and after the necessary interviews with stewards and family solicitors had returned this afternoon to Capheaton with his mother. Lady Victoria, even her dauntless soul sick with grief and horrors, had gone to bed at once, and after a funereal dinner, where he had made no response whatever to the feeble efforts of the girls to illuminate the darkness in which he moved, had gone to the smoking-room alone, wishing to think and plan, yet grateful that he could not. He had known nothing of the weakness of his grandfather's heart, and the old gentleman, as ruddy and debonair as ever, had just come in from the coverts when he arrived at the Abbey a few hours after Zeal's departure from Capheaton. Always vain of his health and appearance since his complete recovery, now many years ago, Lord Strathland had turned a haughty back upon the one physician that had dared to warn him; not even his valet was permitted to suspect that he had been forced to pay to Time any debt beyond bleaching hair and an occasional twinge of gout. The care he had taken of himself in his delicate youth had given him a finer constitution than he would have been likely to enjoy had he been able to go the wild way of many of his family; and it was his familiar boast that he intended to live until ninety.