Gaston Belward was not sentimental: that belongs to the middle-class Englishman’s ideal of civilisation. But he had a civilisation akin to the highest; incongruous, therefore, to the general as the sympathy between the United States and Russia. The highest civilisation can be independent. The English aristocrat is at home in the lodge of a Sioux chief or the bamboo-hut of a Fijian, and makes brothers of “savages,” when those other formal folk, who spend their lives in keeping their dignity, would be lofty and superior. When Gaston looked at his father’s clothes and turned them over, he had a twinge of honest emotion; but his mind was on the dinner and his heritage, and he only said, as he frowned at the tightness of the waistband: “Never mind, we’ll make ‘em pay, shot and wadding, for what you lost, Robert Belward; and wherever you are, I hope you’ll see it.” In twelve minutes from the time he entered the bedroom he was ready. He pulled the bell-cord, and then passed out. A servant met him on the stairs, and in another minute he was inside the dining-room. Sir William’s eyes flashed up. There was smouldering excitement in his face, but one could not have guessed at anything unusual. A seat had been placed for Gaston beside him. The situation was singular and trying. It would have been easier if he had merely come into the drawing-room after dinner. This was in Sir William’s mind when he asked him to dine; but it was as it was. Gaston’s alert glance found the empty seat. He was about to make towards it, but he caught Sir William’s eye and saw it signal him to the end of the table near him. His brain was working with celerity and clearness. He now saw the woman whose portrait had so fascinated him in the library. As his eyes fastened on her here, he almost fancied he could see the boy’s--his father’s-face looking over her shoulder. He instantly went to her, and said: “I am sorry to be late.” His first impulse had been to offer his hand, as, naturally, he would have done in “barbaric” lands, but the instinct of this other civilisation was at work in him. He might have been a polite casual guest, and not a grandson, bringing the remembrance, the culmination of twenty-seven years’ tragedy into a home; she might have been a hostess with whom he wished to be on terms: that was all.