“If you could find some decent woman who would overlook the past, and get him to marry her, she might be able to keep him straight,” he said bluntly. “On the other hand, she might not.” “I feel sure that he might be saved by the right woman,” the Duchess said earnestly. “I am convinced that the poor boy is secretly sick of the life he has been leading, and only his pride keeps him from giving it up. A noble, pure-minded girl, who really cared for him, would be able to do anything she liked with Alistair.” This time the allusion was too plain to be mistaken. The Home Secretary intercepted the blush on Hero’s face, and his eyes were opened. A look of dissatisfaction replaced his indifferent air, as he replied with some bitterness: “I am not so sure of it. Many a good woman has sacrificed her life before now in the effort to reclaim a man who was unworthy of her, and the sacrifice has been in vain.” In saying this he was thinking of the history of his own father and mother, of which he had learned more than his mother suspected. He had sometimes felt surprised, as well as mortified, that he should have had such a parent as Lord Alexander. Never having seen his father since early childhood, and being free from any tendency to romantic idealism, the Duke was able to judge the dead man quite impartially, and to think of him as if he had been some remote ancestor, whose virtues and vices were merely matter of curiosity for his descendants. “I wonder my mother’s own experience has not taught her the folly of thinking that a worthless man can be redeemed by a good wife,” he reflected impatiently. “Alistair takes after his father; no doubt that is why she has always loved him better than me. Her whole soul is absorbed in trying to save him from the consequences of his own follies, and I am merely a pawn in the game. Now she wants to enlist Hero Vanbrugh in the same task, as if a girl like that were fit for nothing better than to be the keeper of a drunken prodigal.” The Duchess observed the frown on her eldest son’s brow with wondering dismay. It did not occur to her that he could be moved by any other feeling than fraternal jealousy. Old-fashioned in her ideas on this subject, as on most others, she had never contemplated it as possible that the Duke of Trent and Colonsay could marry out of his own class. And the class in which, with perfectly unconscious pride, she placed her young friend was that middle one which appeared to have been created to supply doctors and lawyers and men of business for the service of the aristocracy. In her eyes the girl’s father, Sir Bernard Vanbrugh, was simply a successful medical man. The scientific achievements which had made him a European personage, greater than any Secretary of State, were outside her ken.