I returned cured.  I say.  But how entangled is this web of our life!  How almost impossible is it that good should come unmixed with evil, or evil unmixed with good!  At Margate, where the bracing air did more, I doubt not, towards my restoration to health than all the medicines,—­at Margate my brother drank in his death-poison.

During the very last days of our stay he caught scarlet fever.  In a fortnight he was dead.  The shock to me was very severe.  It laid my mother prostrate for months.

I was now by the death of Frank the representative of our branch of the family, and a little fellow of uncomfortable importance.  My uncle Aylwin of Alvanley. being childless, was certain to leave me his large estates, for he had dropped entirely away from the Aylwins of Rington Manor, and also from the branch of the Aylwin family represented by my kinsman Cyril.

II

THE MOONLIGHT CROSS OF THE GNOSTICS

I

My mother had some prejudice against a public school, and I was sent to a large and important private one at Cambridge.

And go, with Winifred on my mind, I went one damp winter’s morning to Dullingham, our nearest railway station, on my way to Cambridge.

As concerns my school-days, I feel that all that will interest the reader is this:  as I rode through mile upon mile of the flat, wide-stretching country, I made to myself a vow in connection with Winifred,—­a vow that when I left school I would do a certain thing in relation to her, though Fate itself should say, ’This thing shall not be done.’  I did not know then, as I know now, how weak is human will enmeshed in that web of Circumstance that has been a-weaving since the beginning of the world.

I left school without the slightest notion as to what my future course in life was to be.  I was to take my rich uncle’s property.  That was understood now.  And although my mother never talked of the matter, I could see in the pensive gaze she bent on me an ever-present consciousness of a future for me more golden still.

But now I formed a new intimacy, and one of a very singular kind—­an intimacy with my father, who suddenly woke up to the fact that I was no longer a child.  It occurred on my making some pertinent inquiries about a certain Gnostic amulet representing the Gorgon’s head, a prize of which he had lately become the happy possessor.  On his telling me that the Arabic word for amulet was hamalet, and that the word meant ‘that which is suspended,’ I said in a perfectly thoughtless way that very likely one of the learned societies to which he belonged might be able to trace some connection between ‘hamalet’ and the ‘Hamlet’ of Shakespeare.  These idle and ignorant words of mine fell, as I found, upon a mind ripe to receive them.  He looked straight before him at the bust of Shakespeare on the bookshelves