The influence of such a paltry nature upon a woman of my mother’s strength and endowments had always astonished as much as it had irritated me.

I had not learnt then what I fully learnt afterwards, that in this life it is mostly the dull and stupid people who dominate the clever ones—­that it is, in short, the fools who govern the world.

I should, of course, never have gone to Belgrave Square at all had it not been to see my mother.  Such a commonplace slave of convention was my aunt, that, on the evening I am now mentioning, she had scarcely spoken to me during dinner, because, having been detained at the solicitor’s, I had found it quite impossible to go to my hotel to dress for her ridiculous seven o’clock dinner.

When I found that my mother had actually taken this inferior woman into her confidence in regard to my affairs and told her all about Winnie and the cross, my dislike of her became intensified, and on this evening my mother very much vexed me in the drawing-room by taking the cross from a cabinet and saying to me,

’What is now to be done with this?  All along the coast there are such notions about its value that to replace it in the tomb would be simple madness.’  I made no reply.  ‘Indeed,’ she continued, looking at the amulet as she might have looked at a cobra uprearing its head to spring at her, ’it must really be priceless.  And to think that all this was to be buried in the coffin of—!  It is your charge, however, and not mine.’

‘Yes, mother,’ I said, ‘it is my charge;’ and taking up the cross I wrapped it in my handkerchief.

‘Take the amulet and guard it well,’ she said, as I placed it carefully in the breast pocket of my coat.

‘And remember,’ said my aunt, breaking into the conversation, ’that the true curses of the Aylwins are and always have been superstition and love-madness.’

‘I should have added a third curse,—­pride, aunt,’ I could not help replying.

‘Henry,’ said she, pursing her thin lips, ’you have the obstinacy and the courage of your race, that is to say, you have the obstinacy and the courage of ten ordinary men, and yet a man you are not—­a man you will never be, if strength of character, and self-mastery and power to withstand the inevitable trials of life, go to the making of a man.’

’Pardon me, aunt; but such trials as mine are beyond your comprehension.’

‘Are they, boy?’ said she.  ’This fancy of yours for an insignificant girl—­this boyish infatuation which with any other young man of your rank would have long ago exhausted itself and been forgotten—­is a passion that absorbs your life.  And I tremble for you:  I tremble for the house you represent.’

But I saw by the expression on my mother’s face that my aunt had now gone too far.  ‘Prue,’ she said, ’your tremblings concerning my son and my family are, I assure you, gratuitous.  Such trembling as the case demands you had better leave to me.  My heart tells me I have been very wrong to that poor child, and I would give much to know that she was found and that she was well.’