Being nearly as active as a squirrel, he had climbed the bole of one of the big old trees in the park, and there, for two days and nights—the month being June—he lay perdu in his leafy shelter, being supplied with food meanwhile by Martin Rigg, who was the only person in the secret of his hiding-place. It was only his father’s threat, conveyed to him by that faithful servitor, to send for Captain Darville’s bloodhounds and so track him down, that induced him to give himself up. For this freak he was sentenced to a week of bread-and-water in a darkened room. Even so, he was not left wholly forlorn, food and candles and books being surreptitiously conveyed to him from the servants’ hall. But Mr. Duggan never laid hands on him again. In due course this period of his life came to an end, and it was with something of the feeling of a captive released after a long imprisonment that he one day found himself on his way to Harrow, from which place, in the natural sequence of things, he proceeded to Cambridge. All his life Alec had stood in awe of his father. It was a feeling which, to some extent, had been fostered by his mother. To both of them it had been as a load lifted off their lives when the baronet left home on one of his excursions, and both had looked forward with dread to his return. There had been no cordiality, no sympathy, no _rapprochement_ in any proper sense of the word, between father and son. That, however, had been owing to no fault on the boy’s part, for Alec’s was one of those bright, open dispositions which respond readily to whatever kindly influences may be brought to bear on them. But Sir Gilbert had no liking for children, or young people, and it was not in his nature to make any exception even in the case of his own son. He had kept himself aloof from him from the first, and with the lapse of years the silent, passive breach between the two, if such it could be termed, grew gradually wider and more impossible of being bridged over. Many an hour’s heartache had the boy, more especially after his mother’s death, but there was too large a tincture of family pride in his composition to allow of even an inkling of what he felt to be visible on the surface. More than once in after-life he said bitterly to himself: “If when I was young, my father had treated me as other fathers treat their sons, I should have been a different man from what I am now.” That might, or might not, have been the case. It was while Alec was at Harrow that Sir Gilbert married again. There was no question of sentiment mixed up with his second matrimonial venture, as there had been with his first. It was the simple fact of Miss Delmayne being possessed of a fortune of sixty thousand pounds in her own right that led him to propose to her.