counter-swearing, and all the dead father’s life raked up, and perhaps shameful stories told of the old man who had to-day been laid in his grave with so much honour. This was the only way in which in these days a man could fight. But it was only now and then, by intervals, that Paul’s thoughts took any form so definite. He did not want to think. There was in him a vague and general sense of destruction--ruin, downfall, and humiliation which he could not endure. But, strangely enough, in all this he never thought of the plans which so short a while ago he had considered as shaping his life. He did not think that now he could go back to them, and, free from all encumbrances of duty, pursue the way he had chosen. The truth was, he did not think of them at all. In the morning Spears and his colleagues had come to his mind as something from which he had escaped, but at night he did not think of them at all. They were altogether wiped out of his mind and obliterated by the loss of that which he had never possessed. When he went home all the lights in the great house seemed extinguished save one candle which flickered in the hall window, and the light in his mother’s room, which shone out like a star into the summer darkness. It was Alice who came noiseless, before he could knock, and opened the great door. “Mamma cannot sleep till she has seen you,” said the girl. “Oh, Paul, we must think of her now. I sent all the servants to bed. I have been watching for you at the window. I could not bear Brown and the rest to think that there was anything wrong.” “But they must soon know that everything is wrong. It is not a thing that can be hid.” “Perhaps it may be hid, Paul. It may turn out it is all a delusion--or an imposture.” “Let us go to my mother’s room,” said Paul. He said nothing as he went up the stairs, but when he got to the landing he turned round upon the pale girl beside him carrying the light, whose white face illuminated by her candle made a luminous point in the gloom. He turned round to her all at once in the blackness of the great vacant place. “It is no imposture; it is true. Whether we can bear it or not, it is true!” “God will help us to bear it, Paul; if you will not desert us--if you will stay by us----” “Desert you--was there ever any question of deserting you?” he said. He looked at his sister with a half-complaining curiosity and surprise, and shrugged his shoulders, so foolish did it sound to him. Then he took the candle from her hand, almost rudely, and walked before her to their mother’s room. “You women never understand,” he said. CHAPTER II.