Twice he had paid Alec’s debts and started him afresh with a clean slate; but on the second occasion he had given him plainly to understand that he must look for no further help in that line, but confine himself strictly to the fairly liberal allowance which had been settled on him when he came of age. Despite the determination thus expressed, no very long time had elapsed before a couple of tradesmen’s accounts for considerable sums were received by the baronet, with a request for an early liquidation of the same—not, however, sent by Alec, but by the creditors themselves. Instead of returning the bills to their senders, as most parents would have done, with a curt disavowal of all liability, Sir Gilbert chose rather to confiscate his son’s allowance to the amount of the debts in question. From that time, now upwards of half a year ago, there had been no communication of any kind between father and son. Alec, however, was not left wholly without means, he having still an income of a hundred and eighty pounds a year, derivable from funded property left him by his mother. Sir Gilbert had had an agreeable surprise in the course of the day with the evening of which we are now concerned, and yet it was a surprise not untinged with sadness. His old friend Mr. Jopling, like himself an ardent numismatist and collector, had died a few weeks before, much to the baronet’s regret. To-day there had reached him a tiny packet, forwarded by Mr. Jopling’s executors, containing a couple of rare coins bequeathed him by his dead friend. One of them was a gold stater of Argos, with the head of Hera, the reverse being Diomedes carrying the palladium; while the other was a scarce fifty-shilling piece of Cromwell. Sir Gilbert had long envied his friend the possession of them, and now they were his own; therefore was the feeling with which he regarded them one of mingled pleasure and pain. He had devoted the evening to a rearrangement of the contents of some of his cases and cabinets and to deciding upon a resting-place for his newly-acquired treasures. It had been a labour of love. But, for all that, his thoughts every now and again would keep reverting from the pleasant task he had set himself to his eldest son; for this was the latter’s birthday, a fact which the father could not forget, although he would fain have kept it in the background of his memory. On just such a wild night twenty-four years before, had John Alexander Clare been born. With what bright hopes, with what glowing expectations he had been welcomed on the stage of life, Sir Gilbert alone could have told. A groan broke involuntarily from his lips when he pictured in thought the difference between then and now. His heart was very bitter against his son. The night was creeping on apace.