For he had kept two of his
sons out of their own all these years, only in order to make the
position and prospects of the third, at last, certainly doubtful,
and perhaps wretched.
There was much to excuse him to himself, no doubt, he cried to his
own soul piteously in the night watches. Proud man as he was, he
could not so wholly abase himself even to his inmost self as to admit
he had sinned without deep provocation. He thought it all over in
his heart, just there, exactly as it all happened, that simple and
natural tale of a common wrong, that terrible secret of a lifetime
that he was still to repent in sackcloth and ashes,
It was so long before--all those twenty-six years, or was it
twenty-eight?--since his regiment had been quartered away down in
Devonshire. He was a handsome subaltern then, with a frank open
face--Harry Kelmscott, of the Greys--just such another man, he said
to himself in his remorse, as his son Granville now--or rather,
perhaps, as Guy and Cyril Waring. For he couldn't conceal from
himself any longer the patent fact that Lucy Waring's sons were
like his own old self, and sturdier, handsomer young fellows into
the bargain than Lady Emily Kelmscott's boy Granville, whom he
had made into the heir of the Tilgate manors.
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