It was as well, perhaps, for more reasons than one, that Lady Clare had no knowledge of the considerable sums disbursed by the baronet from time to time in liquidation of the debts contracted by his spendthrift heir. In those matters Mr. Page, the family solicitor, was the only person taken into Sir Gilbert’s confidence. It was a source of gratification to her ladyship to know that father and son lived on permanently bad terms with each other; and when, after that October night which saw the heir banished from home, her husband told her that Alec had gone abroad, and that they were not likely to be troubled with him or his affairs again for a long time to come, she sincerely rejoiced. Alec was wild and careless of his health, and reckless in many ways. There was no knowing what might come to pass. It no longer seemed to her the foolish daydream she had deemed it heretofore, that she might, perhaps, live to hear her son addressed as Sir Randolph Clare of Withington Chase. It was well for her ladyship, as it is for all of us, that there was no invisible hand to draw aside the curtain of the future and reveal to her even a glimpse of what was to be. Meanwhile, the real heir had unaccountably vanished from the haunts which had known him, and was as one dead to that little world in which he had been such a familiar figure. No word of him, or message of any kind reached his whilom associates. A vague rumour got spread about, originating no one seemed to know how or whence, that he had joined a certain exploring expedition which just then was being a good deal talked about; but it was a rumour which was never confirmed. Men talked and wondered for a little while, and then presently he was forgotten. CHAPTER III. ALEC’S PROPOSITION With the inmates of Withington Chase two uneventful years glided imperceptibly away. Between Sir Gilbert and his wife the name of the proscribed heir was never mentioned; to all seeming he had vanished out of their lives as completely as if he had never existed. That his image still dwelt more or less in his father’s thoughts was only in the natural order of things, but to faithful Mr. Page alone, from whom the baronet had few or no secrets, did Alec’s name ever cross his lips, and to him no oftener than was unavoidable. The lawyer had duly remitted his quarterly allowance to the young man, forwarding it now to one obscure continental town and now to another, in accordance with Alec’s written request; but, beyond that, nothing whatever was known of him or his whereabouts. Then one day the baronet received a letter from his son, dated from Catanzaro, a small out-of-the-way town in southern Italy.