‘How accident,’ said he, ‘brought him to knowledge of his parentage is a true story but a past one. Let it suffice, Sir, that he knows, and eke is bitter hostile to one author of his invalidity, and that not the dead one. His blood is proud and hot, and I should dread beyond measure their meeting. No, he’s better from Court--’ and he told Raleigh of the little contretemps the day the Queen went a’hawking, and of Brion’s gesture of hate and repulsion, and of how he had been in terror ever since of some evil befalling his charge. The Captain bent his brows over the recital. It was true he had not guessed of this knowledge of Brion’s, and it altered the case for him. It might affect--perhaps he debated, if there were truth in the report of his cordial relations with a certain great nobleman--his own favoured position, and evoke animosity where had been friendship. ‘Well, on the whole,’ said he, ‘mayhap he is right, and thou, excellent servitor’--and from that time he made no other attempt to shake the young man’s resolution. But the fear of some catastrophe still nervously abode with Clerivault, in spite of that confidence now shared with a sympathetic and influential friend, and he was never easy when the young man was out of his sight. He would follow him like his shadow; impose himself on him uninvited in a way that presently drove Brion to rebellion, and later to exasperation. He had no need, he said, to go in leading-strings to a male nurse; he had the wit to find his own way about, and a preference, on occasion, for his own company above any other that might attach itself to him. He was not always kind in the way he vented his irritability on the poor fellow. But Clerivault uttered no complaint; he took all rebuffs with a stoical impassibility, indifferent to wounds received in what his duty told him was an indispensable service. He had not, it is true, the clue to one motive inclining his young master to fits of restless moodiness, in which he desired to be, and wander, alone. Since the night of that absurd but rather shattering escapade a sense of some disaster threatening a long cherished ideal had haunted Brion’s mind like a secret shadow. He would stoutly deride its menace, would refuse to admit or analyse it, but it remained there all the time, and he could not throw off the consciousness of its possession. His faith had been shaken, and in a very unpalatable manner. That shrill and vulgar little termagant seemed to have blown away at a blast all that sentiment which had wafted him on wings of rapture towards an imagined goal. The whole thing was cheapened and vulgarised. A sense of his own credulous folly, of the necessity of eschewing for the future all such illusive enthusiasms, and setting worldly wisdom in their place, gripped and resolved him. He must rise from this time superior to the rather exotic romanticism which for so long had affected his outlook, and must become that independent and self-reliant entity which