Desmond kissed his mother and went to his room. But it was long before he slept. His bruised body found no comfort; his head throbbed; his soul was filled with resentment and the passionate longing for release. His life had not been very happy. He barely remembered his father--a big, keen-eyed, loud-voiced old man--who died when his younger son was four years old. Richard Burke had run away from his Irish home to sea. He served on Admiral Rooke’s flagship at the battle of La Hogue, and, rising in the navy to the rank of warrant-officer, bought a ship with the savings of twenty years and fitted it out for unauthorized trade with the East Indies. His daring, skill, and success attracted the attention of the officers of the Company. He was invited to enter the Company’s service. As captain of an Indiaman he sailed backwards and forwards for ten years; then at the age of fifty retired with a considerable fortune and married the daughter of a Shropshire farmer. The death of his wife’s relatives led him to settle on the farm their family had tenanted for generations, and it was at Wilcote Grange that his three children were born. Fifteen years separated the elder son from the younger; between them came a daughter, who married early and left the neighbourhood. Four years after Desmond’s birth the old man died, leaving the boy to the guardianship of his brother. There lay the seed of trouble. No brothers could have been more unlike than the two sons of Captain Burke. Richard was made on a large and powerful scale; he was hard-working, methodical, grasping, wholly unimaginative, and in temper violent and domineering. Slighter and less robust, though not less healthy, Desmond was a boy of vivid imagination, high-strung, high-spirited, his feelings easily moved, his pride easily wounded. His brother was too dull and stolid to understand him, taking for deliberate malice what was but boyish mischief, and regarding him as sullen when he was only dreamily thoughtful. As a young boy Desmond kept as much as possible out of his brother’s way. But as he grew older he came more directly under Richard’s control, with the result that they were now in a constant state of feud. Their mother, a woman of sweet temper but weak will, favoured her younger son in secret; she learnt by experience that open intervention on his behalf did more harm than good.