"Roland?--Yes. But wait--don't be in a hurry to talk. Keep quiet for a little while," she answered sadly. "The deep-dyed scoundrel! Eleanor, if you had heard what he said to me as he stood there! Now listen to me. He is dead to us henceforth, stone dead. And tell the others--Hubert and Nellie--that if ever they mention his name in my hearing, or hold any communication with him whatever, that day they go after him." Mrs Dorrien assented sadly. She had got what she knew to be the secret wish of her heart. Her Hubert--her darling boy--would be Dorrien of Cranston; for she knew her husband too well to suppose he would ever relent. But it may be, furthermore, that her hard, cold nature felt a twinge of regret as she thought of this unloved son and realised that she would never see him again, and if her conscience cried loudly of maternal neglect and duties unfulfilled, we may be very sure she stifled it. Yet this sin of omission was destined to bring upon her an awful retribution. CHAPTER NINETEEN. "AND THUS WE PARTED THERE." Roland Dorrien walked from his father's door with quick, angry strides. Everything had turned out exactly as he had expected, and the halle of his ancestors would know him no more. Why should he regret it? Within them he had known nothing but coldness--had met with scant measure of affection--and now he was leaving them for ever. He passed out through the park gates with the Dorrien arms engraved upon the stone pillars--a mailed hand grasping by the neck a writhing serpent, which, with crest reared and fangs gaping wide and threatening, was in keeping with the motto underneath, "I strike"--and reached the high road. Even then he smiled satirically as he reflected that the lodge-keeper's obsequious curtsey would probably be much less profound were the good woman aware that it was only Roland Dorrien, the disinherited heir, who walked past, instead of, as she supposed, her future lord. Suddenly he became aware of a scuffle in the park behind him, and, turning, he beheld the deer look up from their feeding and trot away in alarmed groups. Then the cause of this appeared--something red and white, tearing at full speed down the drive. A moment more, and the object dashed against him, panting, and nearly knocking him down. "Why, Roy!" he cried in concern. "Dear old Roy! I had clean forgotten you. And they were quite capable of having you knocked on the head if they had known you were there. Perhaps he did try, as it was," he went on, with a dark look in the direction of the Hall.