‘He was such a promising child,’ Homer Sivewright said to himself, as he sat by the hearth in the panelled parlour, absorbed in gloomy meditation, ‘and I hoped so much from him. How was it that he went astray? Was it innate wickedness, or his mother’s evil teaching?’ One pang was spared him. He did not know that the son he had once so fondly loved had tried to sap the last dregs of his failing life by slow poison. He knew that Ferdinand was a baffled murderer, for he had seen the knife pointed at his own breast by that relentless hand. But he might extenuate even this deadly assault by supposing it to be unpremeditated—a sudden access of ungovernable rage. So he sat by his hearth, and brooded upon days so long vanished that it seemed almost as if they belonged to another life; as if the chief figure in those departed scenes—himself—had been a different person, and had died long ago, so utterly had he outgrown and passed away from the Homer Sivewright of that time. He thought with a new and keen regret of a period that had been sorely troubled, yet not without hope. His busy brain had been full of schemes of self-aggrandisement—the dulness of the present brightened by one perpetual day-dream, the vision of accumulated wealth, which he and his only son were to share. The boy’s good looks and talent had promised success. He seemed born to conquer—to trample on the necks of less-gifted mankind. Delusive dreams—baseless calculations! Between that time and this lay the dark world of memory, peopled with the phantoms of dead hopes.