gathered about the Countess or lounged on the gray stone steps of the Elizabethan house.  The sun shone brightly on the oriole casements, the antique gables, the twisted chimneys, all covered with crimson parasites and trailing ivy; the horses, the scarlet, the pack in the paddock adjacent, the shrubberies of laurel and araucaria, the sun-tinted terraces, made a bright and picturesque grouping.  Bertie, with his hand on Vivandiere’s pommel, after taking a deep draught of sparkling Rhenish, looked on at it all with a pleasant sigh of amusement.

“By Jove!” he murmured softly, with a contented smile about his lips, “that was a ringing run!”

At that very moment, as the words were spoken, a groom approached him hastily; his young brother, whom he had scarcely seen since the find, had been thrown and taken home on a hurdle; the injuries were rumored to be serious.

Bertie’s smile faded, he looked very grave; world-spoiled as he was, reckless in everything, and egotist though he had long been by profession, he loved the lad.

When he entered the darkened room, with its faint chloroform odor, the boy lay like one dead, his bright hair scattered on the pillow, his chest bare, and his right arm broken and splintered.  The deathlike coma was but the result of the chloroform; but Cecil never stayed to ask or remember that; he was by the couch in a single stride, and dropped down by it, his head bent on his arms.

“It was my fault.  I should have looked to him.”

The words were very low; he hated that any should see he could still be such a fool as to feel.  A minute, and he conquered himself; he rose, and with his hand on the boy’s fair tumbled curls, turned calmly to the medical men who, attached to the household, had been on the spot at once.

“What is the matter?”

“Fractured arm, contusion; nothing serious, nothing at all, at his age,” replied the surgeon.  “When he wakes out of the lethargy he will tell you so himself, Mr. Cecil.”

“You are certain?”—­do what he would his voice shook a little; his hand had not shaken, two days before, when nothing less than ruin or ransom had hung on his losing or winning the race.

“Perfectly certain,” answered the surgeon cheerfully.  “He is not overstrong, to be sure, but the contusions are slight; he will be out of that bed in a fortnight.”

“How did he fall?”

But while they told him he scarcely heard; he was looking at the handsome Antinous-like form of the lad as it lay stretched helpless and stricken before him; and he was remembering the death-bed of their mother, when the only voice he had ever reverenced had whispered, as she pointed to the little child of three summers:  “When you are a man take care of him, Bertie.”  How had he fulfilled the injunction?  Into how much brilliantly tinted evil had he not led him—­by example, at least?

The surgeon touched his arm apologetically, after a lengthened silence: