“Why? Is every thought holy that is printed and bound up in morocco? Through your father’s dishonesty to my mother and yours to me, I have had to pass the best years of my life in revelry of the imagination only. And so I whetted an appetite for pleasure which I have only just begun to satisfy as yours is exhausted.” The earl felt for the first time in his life an impulse of fear; there was something scarcely human, something ghoulish, in the face before him. The eyes seemed to shoot flames through the fire-smoke. “I am getting tedious, my lord,” continued Goodhare, with mock respect, after a short pause, during which the two men watched each other warily. “Let us sum up the situation. Your father and mine, an unmarried man, deceived my mother, a country lawyer’s daughter, by a mock marriage. He took her away to North Wales, and kept her there in privacy, on goodness knows what wretched plea. I was their son--his eldest son. She knew who he was; she thought I was his heir. I was fourteen before, in that out-of-the-way place, we learnt that he had married a woman of his own rank. Then the truth came out. My mother was broken-hearted, and did not live through the year. I was brought up a gentleman and left a beggar. Then, with stupendous generosity you gave me office as librarian--to close my mouth. And all your favors you gave to Rees Pennant, whom for that reason I have ruined. And so I lived near enough to hear the vices condoned in you which in me would have been condemned; to see a beautiful girl repulse my honorable advances with as much horror as she did your dishonorable ones. And yet my mother was a better woman than yours, and _I_ am the eldest son.” “But you are mad! Can I help the law?” “Can I respect it? Let us be logical. You are the eldest son above ground, in the daylight, by right of the law. I am the eldest son down in the earth, from which I took my birthright. And so here, down in the earth, I take my revenge on the law and on you!” With a spring he leapt over the iron grate, in which the fire now burnt with a steady red glow. Seizing Lord St. Austell by the throat before the earl had the least intimation of his purpose, Goodhare, with a growling noise like a wild beast, twisted him and flung him down on to the red-hot coals. Before his victim had time for more than one struggle, one shout for help, Amos had torn open his waistcoat, and plunging a large claspknife between his ribs, stabbed him to the heart.