had lord sandilands been less preoccupied by certain thoughts, and less disturbed by certain associations and recollections, suddenly aroused by the incidents which had just taken place, and of a painful and distracting kind, he would have been more strongly moved by miles challoner's abrupt and extraordinary communication. but the old nobleman's mood just then was a strange one; and the scene which had passed before his eyes, the words which his young friend had spoken, affected him but slightly and vaguely. there had been some unpleasantness for miles in the meeting with that clever-looking fellow, lloyd; and he was sorry for it. that was all. old mark has desired miles to avoid this man, had he? the squire had been very odd latterly, and had taken strong dislikes, and entertained strong prejudices all his life, but especially since that bad business about his son; and in the midst of his personal preoccupation and abstraction, lord sandilands had time for a shudder at the thought of his old friend's great grief, and a sort of pang of thankfulness that it had come to an end, even though a life he valued dearly was finished with it. but his mind was full of his own concerns, and before he had reached the seclusion of his own particular sanctum--a small room within the library--he had almost forgotten the occurrence.

lord sandilands sighed heavily as he sat down in a deep leather chair by the window, which opened into a small verandah, with trellised walls well clothed with creeping plants, and tiled with cool quaint-patterned porcelain. a light iron staircase led thence to the garden, which, though unavoidably towny, was cool, pretty, and well-cared for. the summer air passed lightly over the flowers, and carried their fresh morning breath to the old man. but he did not meet its perfume gladly; it had no soothing, no refreshing influence for him. he moved uneasily, as though some painful association had come to him with the scented breeze; then rose impatiently, and shut the window down, and paced the room from end to end. "a wonderful likeness," he muttered; "quite too close for accident. there is more expression, more power in the face, but just the same beauty. yes, it must be so; but why have i not been told?"--he stopped before a table, and tapped it with his fingers. "and yet, why should i have been told? i made the conditions, i defined the rules myself; and why should i wonder that they have not been broken? what beauty and what talent! who would have thought it of poor gerty's child!--for her child and mine, grace lambert is, i am certain. what a strange sudden shock it was to me! i wonder if anyone perceived it--thought i was ill, perhaps. the room was hot and overcrowded, as usual; and lady carabas cackled more unbearably than ever; still, i hope i did not make a fool of myself; i hope i did not look upset."

thus, lord saudi lands, true to the ruling principles of his order and his age, was disturbed in the midst of greater and deeper disturbance, and even diverted from his thoughts of it, by the dread so touchingly proper to every british mind, that he had been betrayed into emotion, into any departure from the unruffled and impassive calm which british society demands.

at this stage of his soliloquy lord sandilands looked at himself in the chimney-glass, passed his aristocratically slender fingers through his aristocratically fine silver hair, and assured himself that his outward man had not suffered from the internal perturbation and surprise which he had experienced. this critical examination concluded, he resumed his walk and his soliloquy, which we need not follow in form. its matter was as follows:

in grace lambert, lord sandilands had recognised so strong a likeness to the mother of the little girl whom he had placed under mrs. bloxam's care, and towards whom he had never displayed any fatherly affection beyond that implied by the punctual and uninterrupted discharge of the pecuniary obligations which he had contracted towards that lady, that he entertained no doubt whatever of her identity with gertrude keith. this discovery had agitated him less by reason of any present significance which it possessed--the girl was clever, and had achieved in his presence a success of a kind which was undeniably desirable in such a position as hers--than because it had touched long-silent chords, and touched them to utterances full of pain for the old man, who had been so thoroughly of the world, and whom the world had, on the whole, treated remarkably well. but lord sandilands was growing old, and was naturally beginning to yield just a little to the inevitable feeling, of being rather tired of it all, which comes with age, to the best-treated among the sons of men, and had come perceptibly to him, since mark challoner's death had done away with the last of the old landmarks. things might have been so different; he had often thought so, and then put the thought from him hurriedly and resolutely. he thought so to-day, and he could not put the thought from him; it would not go; but, as he paced the room, it grew stronger and stronger and came closer and closer to him, and at last looked him sternly and threateningly in the face, demanding harbour and reply; and lord sandilands gave it both--no more expelling it, but taking counsel with himself, and repeating to himself an old story of the past, which, with a different ending, might have set all his present in another key;--which story was not very different from many that have--been told, and not difficult to tell.

lord sandilands had not succeeded early in life to his old title and respectable but not magnificent estates. the honourable john borlase was much more clever, agreeable, and fascinating than rich, when, having left the university of oxford after a very creditable career, he began to lead the kind of life which is ordinarily led by young men who have only to wait for fortune and title, and who possess sufficient means to fill up the interval comfortably, and sufficient intellect to occupy it with tolerable rationality. the dilettanteism which was one of lord sandilands' characteristics developed itself later in life; while he was a young man, his tastes were more active, and he had devoted himself to sporting and travel. in the pursuit of the first he had made mark challoner's acquaintance; and the camaraderie of the hunting-field had strengthened into a strong and congenial tie of friendship, which had been broken only by the squire's death. in the pursuit of the second, john borlase had encountered many adventures, and made more than one acquaintance destined to influence his future, either sensibly or insensibly; and among the many was one with whom we have to do, for a brief interval of retrospection.

john borlase did not affect "bohemianism" (the phrase had not then been invented, but the thing existed); but he liked character, and he liked art,--liked it better than he understood it, selected the society of those who knew more about it than he did; and though he by no means restricted himself to the society of artists, he certainly frequented them more than any other class. it was at berlin that he fell in with etienne gautier, an eccentric and very clever frenchman, exiled by the cruelty of fortune from his native paradise, paris, and employed by the french government in some mysterious commission connected with the galleries of painting and sculpture at berlin,--a city which he never ceased to depreciate, but where he nevertheless appeared to enjoy himself thoroughly. etienne gautier was a dark, active, restless man; vivacious of speech; highly informed on all matters appertaining to art; a liberal in politics and religion--of a degree of liberalism very unusual at that period, though it would not be regarded as particularly "advanced" at present; an oddity in his manners; evidently in poor circumstances, which he treated with that perfect absence of disguise and affectation which is so difficult for english people to comprehend, so impossible for them to imitate; and devotedly, though injudiciously, attached to his beautiful daughter, gertrude. the girl's mother, an englishwoman, had died at her birth, and her father had brought her up after a completely unconventional fashion, and one which would have horrified his own countrymen in particular. she was allowed as much freedom as "bird on branch," and her education was of the most desultory description. gertrude gautier was very handsome, very wilful, and totally destitute of knowledge of the world. she was her father's companion in all places and at all times; and when the hon. john borlase made etienne gautier's acquaintance and took to frequenting his society, he found that it included that of one of the handsomest, cleverest, and most spirited girls he had ever met. john borlase was not quite a free man when he first saw gertrude gautier. had her position in life been such as to render his marrying her a wise and suitable proceeding, he could not have offered to do so with honour, though the engagement, if so it could be called, which bound him to the lady lucy beecher, was of a cool and vague description, and much more the doing of their respective families than their own. but he had carried the not unpleasant obligation cheerfully for a year or more; and it was only when he fully and freely acknowledged to himself that he had fallen in love with gertrude gautier, and felt a delightful though embarrassing consciousness that she had fallen in love with him, that he grumbled at his engagement, and persuaded himself that but for its existence he would certainly have married gertrude, and boldly set the opinions and wishes of his family at defiance. it was a pleasing delusion: there never existed a man less likely to have done anything of the kind than john borlase; but he cherished the belief, which nothing in his former life tended to justify. he was a proud man in a totally unaffected way; and only his fancy--not for a moment his real practical self--regarded the possibility of the elevation into a future british peeress of a girl whose father was a painter, of the bohemian order, and in whose maternal ancestry the most noteworthy "illustration" was a wholesale grocer. as for gertrude, she loved him, and that was enough for her. the untaught, undisciplined, passionate girl thought of nothing beyond; and her father, who was as blind as fathers usually are to the fact that his daughter was longer a child, but with all the charm and beauty of womanhood had entered upon all its danger gave the matter no consideration whatever. this state of things lasted for several months, and then came a crisis. etienne gautier fell from a height, in one of the berlin galleries, and died of the injuries he had received, after recovering consciousness for just sufficient time to commend his daughter to the care and kindness of john borlase.

"send her to leamington," said the dying man; "her mother's uncle lives there. she knows his name."

there is little need to pursue the story of gertrude gautier further. she never went to leamington; she never saw the prosperous grocer, her mother's uncle. the story is not a new one, but at least it ended better than many a one like it has ended. gertrude was happy; she had no scruples; she knew no better. she had no friends to forfeit; she had no position to lose. her lover was true to her, and all the more devoted that he had many stings of conscience of which she had no suspicion, in which she never shared. he brought her to england, and the girl was happy in her pretty suburban house, with her birds, her flowers, and his society. but a time came in which john borlase had the chance of testing his own sincerity; and he applied the test, and recognised its failure. when the institution of the suburban house was a year old, and when he had frequently congratulated himself upon the successful secrecy which had been maintained, john borlase found a letter to his address awaiting him at his father's town-house. the letter was from lady lucy beecher, and it contained the intelligence of her marriage. "i knew you did not care for me," said the fair and frank writer, "in any sense which would give us a chance of being happy together; but i did not make a fuss about the family arrangement before it became necessary to do so. that necessity arose when i found myself deliberately preferring another man to you. i do so prefer hugh wybrant, and i have married him. my people are very angry, of course--perhaps yours will be so also; but you will not care much about that; and i am sure you will heartily thank me for what i have done. we shall always be good friends, i hope; and if we had married, we could never have been more, and might easily--indeed should very certainly, i am convinced--have been less." john borlase was much relieved by the intelligence contained in this characteristic letter. lady lucy had troubled his mind, had been a difficulty to him. under the circumstances he would not have married, he would not have done so doubly dishonourable an action; but he was very glad the ostensible breach was of her making and not his. he derived a pleasant self-congratulatory conviction that he was rather a lucky fellow from this fortunate occurrence; and he answered lady lucy's flippant letter by one which was full of kindliness and good-humour, and accompanied by a set of neapolitan coral.

then came the question which would make itself heard. should he marry gertrude? he could do so without risk of her antecedents being discovered; the only odium he would have to bear would be that of her foreign birth and insignificant, indefinite origin. the girl's own feelings, strange to say, counted but little with john borlase, in the discussion he held with himself, and which need not be pursued further. if he had decided in her favour, he felt that a first and important preliminary would be that he should explain to her the degradation of her present position, and the immense advantages to her of the compensation which he should offer her by marrying her. their life would be changed, of course; and what had such a change to give him? he reasoned entirely as a man of the world; and the upshot of his deliberations was that he did not marry gertrude gautier. it made no difference to her; she did not know that the subject had ever occupied him; she had never heard lady lucy's name. her calm, happy, guilty love-dream went on for a little longer, and then it ended. the doom of her mother was on gertrude; and john borlase came home one day, as etienne gautier had come home, to find a dead woman and a helpless infant where he had left youth and health and beauty in the morning. the blow fell heavily upon john borlase, and remorse as well as sorrow was for a long time busy at his heart. during this period he was extremely restless, and the world was quite concerned and edified to see how much he had taken lady lucy's defection to heart. who would have thought a man could possess so much feeling? and then, the generosity with which he acted, the pains he had taken to show how completely he was sans rancune; how could lady lucy have done such a thing! but everybody flocked to see lady lucy, for all that; and as for captain wybrant, never was there anyone so charming. john borlase did not hear all the talk, or if he did, he did not heed it. he was not a sentimental man, and he was sufficiently unscrupulous; but gertrude's death was more than a racking grief and loss to him. alongside of her shrouded figure he saw her father's; and now, too late, he was haunted by the unfulfilled trust bequeathed him by the dead. deceiving himself again, he tried to persuade himself that only the suddenness of gertrude's death had prevented his marrying her; he tried to throw the blame, which he could not ignore, on circumstances. at first he succeeded, to a certain extent, in this--succeeded sufficiently to deaden the acuteness--of the pain he could not escape from. then, after a time, he knew better; he no longer indulged in self-deception; he acknowledged that the wrong was irreparable, and the self-reproach life-long; and he bowed to the stern truth. john borlase was never afterwards talked of as a marrying man; and lady lucy wybrant, whose sources of social success were numerous and various, enjoyed that one in addition, that the inexorable celibacy of lord sandilands was ascribed to his chivalrous fidelity to her. she knew that this was a fiction, as well as he knew it; but as it was a gleam of additional glorification for her, and such a supposition saved him a great deal of trouble, and preserved him from match-making mammas, each acquiesced in the view which society chose to adopt, with most amiable affability. captain wybrant laughed at the theory of sandilands' celibacy, as he laughed at most other theories; and said (and believed) that if a man must be fool enough to wear the willow for any woman, his lucy was the best worth wearing it for, of all the women in the world. and though the whole thing was a myth, lord sandilands never cordially liked jolly hugh wybrant--perhaps no man ever yet did cordially like the individual in whose favour he has been jilted, though he may not have cared a straw for the fickle fair one, but have honestly regarded her inconstancy as a delightful circumstance, demanding ardent gratitude.

for several years after gertrude gautier's death, the hon. john borlase indulged in frequent and extensive foreign travel; and during this period the infant girl who had inherited her beauty, apparently without her delicacy of constitution, was well cared for. the child's father cared little for her, beyond scrupulously providing for her physical welfare. she was an embodied reproach to him, though he never said so to himself, but persuaded himself his indifference to the little girl whom he saw but rarely and at long intervals, arose from his not naturally caring about children. when she was eight years old, and the memory of her mother had almost died out, though the indelible effect of the sad and guilty episode in his life with which she was connected remained impressed upon him, lord sandilands placed the little girl under mrs. bloxam's care, with the conditions already stated and the results already partially developed. he had provided ample funds to meet the exigencies of her education; he had made due arrangements for their safe and punctual transmission to mrs. bloxam; he had but vague notions concerning the requirements and the risks of girlhood: his dominant idea was, that in a respectable boarding-school the girl must be safe; he did not want to see her; she must not know him as her father; and he had no fancy for playing any part, undertaking any personation,--in short, having any trouble unrepresented by money,--about her. john borlase had been unscrupulous, and a trifle hard in his nature; and despite the conflict in his breast which had ensued on gertrude gautier's death, and which for all his impassive bearing had been fierce and long, lord sandilands was not much more scrupulous, and was decidedly harder. if the girl married, or if she died, he should be made acquainted with the circumstance; and as a matter of fact--fact, not sentiment, being the real consideration in this matter--either was all he need know. as time went on, this frame of mind about his unknown daughter became habitual to lord sandilands; and of late he had never remembered gertrude's existence, except when an entry in his accounts, under a certain appointed formula, recalled the fact to his mind.

these were the circumstances on which lord sandilands mused, as he paced his room in the early morning, after he had seen grace lambert at lady carabas' concert. the girl's face had risen up before him like a ghost,--not only her mother's, but that of his own youth; and in the proud, assured, but not bold glance of her splendid brown eyes a story which had no successor in the old man's lonely life was written. this beautiful, gifted girl was his daughter. she might have been the pride of his life, the darling, the ornament of his home, the light of his declining years, the inheritor of his fortune, if-if he had done right instead of wrong, if he had repaired the injury he had done to her, whose grave lay henceforth and for ever between him and the possibility of reparation.

"how very handsome she is!" he thought; "and how fine and highly cultivated her voice! if i had known she possessed such a talent as that!" and then he thought how that talent might have been displayed in society, in which the possessor might have mixed on equal terms. a long train of images and fancies, of vain and bitter regrets, came up with the strong impression of the girl's grace, beauty, and gifts. of her identity there could be no doubt. as gertrude gautier had looked out from the garden-gate, where she had bidden him the fond and smiling farewell destined to be their last, so this girl, as beautiful as his lost gertrude, and with something of grandeur in her look, which gertrude had not, and which was the grace added by genius, had looked that night, as she calmly, smilingly, received the applause of her audience. as he recalled that look, and dwelt on it in his memory with the full assurance that his conviction was correct, an idea struck him. he was a known connoisseur in music, a known patron of musical art; everyone who was anyone in the musical world sought an introduction to lord sandilands. in the case of miss grace lambert, his generally extended patronage had been especially requested by lady carabas for her protégée. here was a fair and legitimate expedient within his reach for securing access to miss lambert, without the slightest risk of awakening suspicion, either in her mind or in that of sharp-sighted observers, that he was actuated by any particular motive in this instance. he must see her, he must know her! how bitterly he lamented now, and condemned himself for the indifference which had kept him for so many years contented that his child should be a stranger to him! how ready he was, now that he saw her beautiful and gifted, to accord credence and attention to the voice of nature, in which he had never before believed, and which under other circumstances would have found him just as deaf as usual! then he resolved that he would write to mrs. bloxam, and prepare her for a long-deferred visit to her charge, stipulating in his letter that gertrude should know nothing of the intended visit, and that mrs. bloxam should receive him alone. "she shall tell me my child's history," he said; "at least it has been a bright and happy story hitherto." and lord sandilands sighed, and his face looked old and worn, as he arranged his note-paper, and dipped his pen in the ink, and then hesitated and pondered long before he commenced his letter to mrs. bloxam.

the letter consisted of but a few lines, and lord sandilands put it in another cover, addressed to mr. plowden, his solicitor, and the medium of his payments to mrs. bloxam. it was not until he had retired to rest, after sunrise, and had been for some time vainly trying to sleep, that his thoughts reverted to miles challoner and the incident which had taken place just before they parted.

miles challoner, also wakeful, was thinking of it too, and debating with himself whether he should mention the matter again to lord sandilands. he shrank from reviving a subject so full of pain. the man whom he had met evidently had an object in concealing his identity, or he would not have been so reticent by a first impulse. they were not likely to meet again. so miles challoner took a resolution to keep his own counsel; and acted upon it.