Why, Aline is exactly what he must have been at her age, except that Aline has borne the burden of us all so long that she has more lines of care round her dear blue eyes and her gentle mouth than ought to be there. However, Oona says that grandpapa, good as he was, was as spirited a young gentleman as any of his compeers. No one could say of him that he was a milksop. He and Sir Rupert were ever something of rivals from the days they were boys at school together, and not in bookish matters. At games and sports they strove to outstrip each other. They were ensigns in the same regiment, and in the wars abroad none could say which was the better man in the field, though even then Sir Rupert had begun to have something of a bad reputation. Then the peace came, and the two young gentlemen swaggered it a while against each other in London drawing-rooms before coming back to their neighbouring patrimonies. There both fell in love with the same woman. There was never any doubt from the beginning as to the way Aline Ashburton's heart had gone. But Sir Rupert would not believe it till she was actually married. Then he seemed to accept the triumph of his rival so generously, to all appearance, that our dear grandfather was full of remorse for the bad opinion he had held of him for long. Among the Brandon jewels is, or was, the collet of diamonds which Sir Rupert sent our grandmother. Inside the clasp is written, "To the Fairest", with the date of grandmother's marriage. To make a long story short, Sir Rupert most wickedly wormed himself into grandfather's confidence. I can well believe that the generous heart was full of pity and tenderness for its unsuccessful rival. My grandmother, Oona says, never liked the friendship, but she could give no reason, except her feminine instincts, for her distrust of her old suitor, and those were not enough. Ah! dear grandpapa was surely easily duped. Even when his pseudo-friend had betrayed him, no mist of suspicion ever gathered between those blue eyes and the world. In his latter days, indeed, he grew so much like heaven, so little like earth, that his righteous anger against Rupert De Lacy was lost in his profound pity for the sinner--such pity as an angel might have, who should realize all the horror of sin, and yet yearn over the soul for which Christ died. Sir Rupert, even in those early days, had had something of a taste for science, and in the years that followed his disappointment in love he had devoted a certain amount of time to study in the laboratory which he had fitted up in his house. Now there was, where Brandon estate wanders away to the mountain, a bit of unenclosed land, bare and poor, which up to that time had been regarded as waste. It was beyond Brandon walls, and nearly trenched on the lands of Castle Angry.