The others, however, declared that Sir Brian could not be allowed to go away until the water had been boiled and he had been given a cup of tea, and, after protesting a little for form's sake, he let them over-persuade him. The truth was that the sight of their merriment had made him feel a little lonely, and he was pleased that they should wish to admit him to a share in it.

But, of course, with all the good-will in the world, they could not do that. Age must needs be lonely, and Miss Huntley, for one, became instantly serious after Sir Brian's advent, though she took some pains to be pleasant to him, admiring the stately old pile which towered above them, dark and massive against the evening sky, and leading him on to talk of the improvements that he had effected in the property during his tenure of it. He remained chatting with her until Gilbert and Kitty, who had been lighting a fire in a cleft just under the cliff, called out that the kettle was boiling.

"Do you know that you have chosen rather a dangerous place?" said the old gentleman, as he rose to obey their summons. "The men are working at the new path exactly over our heads and they may send a shower of stones down upon us. Brian, will you, like a good fellow, go up and tell them that they may as well knock off for to-day? The light won't last much longer."

"All right," answered Brian, and ran quickly up the zigzag track which led to the heights above.

When he had nearly reached the top he paused for an instant to take breath and looked down at the little knot of people below him. A thin column of blue smoke rose perpendicularly from the fire, round which they were congregated; they seemed to be very merry together, the sound of their laughter being distinctly audible in that still atmosphere; Sir Brian, bending forward, with his elbows on his knees, was saying something to Miss Huntley, whose clear-cut profile was turned towards him, and Miss Joy was pouring out the tea, Mitchell standing up with the kettle in his hand beside her. The whole scene-the party round the fire, the yellow sand, the red cliffs, the dark blue expanse of water, imprinted itself upon Brian's mind like an instantaneous photograph and will scarcely lose its disinctness while he lives. What struck him at the moment was his father's somewhat unwonted geniality and apparent enjoyment of the conversation of his neighbour. Sir Brian had once spoken in a disparaging tone

of "the contractor's daughter," but that prejudice had evidently been surmounted, and the young man thought that, in view of certain wild and delightful possibilities, it would be well that his father and Miss Huntley should be friends.

Thinking of these things, he turned with a smile to resume the ascent, when suddenly his heart gave a bound, the colour fled from his cheeks, and craning over the edge he raised both hands to his mouth and shouted to those below him, "Run!-run for your lives!"

The warning did not come a second too soon. He saw them start up and disperse, and immediately afterwards the mass of earth and rocks of which he had caught sight in the very instant of its separation from the face of the cliff swept past him, the dust of it filling his eyes, and hurled itself with a roar as of thunder into the narrow cleft beneath. No slip of such magnitude had taken place for years, and, but for the narrowness of the chasm which confined its path, it is hardly possible that a single one of the party whom Brian had been contemplating the minute before could have escaped alive.

He did not wait to see what the effects of the catastrophe were, but rushed at the top of his speed down the path by which he had ascended, and the first person whom he met was Miss Huntley, looking pale and scared, but unhurt.

"Thank God !" he exclaimed.

"Oh, no-no!" she gasped, wringing her hands. "Your father-he could not get up in time, and we all ran away; we did not think of him. Oh, can't anything be done?"

What could be done was done without delay. The labourers, to whose work on the summit of the cliff the landslip may have been in some degree due, hurried down as quickly as they could, and set to work manfully with picks and shovels; Brian, Gilbert, and Mitchell took off their coats and helped them; but though they encouraged one another by saying that men had been dug out of as great a depth as that alive before then, they knew in their hearts that the task was a hopeless one; and indeed it was not until long after nightfall that they came upon what had once been Sir Brian Segrave, lying buried beneath a block of sandstone which must have crushed the life out of him instantaneously.

CHAPTER XIII.—THE READING OF THE WILL.

THAT large and seemingly increasing class of persons who attribute the government of

mundane affairs to certain inexorable laws of unknown origin must sometimes, one would think, find the world a curiously provoking place of abode. To have emancipated one's self from all degrading trammels of faith in the supernatural, possibly even (though this would appear to be more rare) from every lingering taint of superstition, to stand erect in all one's ineffable dignity as a vertebrate biped with reasoning faculties of the grandest order, and after all to be reminded at every turn that one's knowledge of the reign of law avails nothing, and that one's best laid schemes of life, together with one's very life itself, are at the mercy of a mere stupid accident-this, surely, should be enough to make the clear-sighted philosopher grind his teeth in impotent indignation. Is it worth while to have shaken off the bondage of revealed religion only to fall under the dominion of blind chance? And certainly, upon the blind chance theory, few better instances of the absurdity of existence could be adduced than that poor old Sir Brian Segrave's death should have occurred when it did. It is true that some people might see in that catastrophe an argument against the intervention of Providence, and might urge that an event so apparently uncalled-for, so purposeless, and so likely to be productive of evil results, ought not to be attributed to anything but the disintegration of the soil caused by heavy rains and subsequent night-frosts. Everything depends upon the point of view; and as very few theories are susceptible of proof, we shall probably all continue to enjoy the satisfaction of calling our neighbours fools until the end of the chapter.

Brian, happily for himself, indulged in no such speculations and moralisings upon the misfortune which had deprived him of his dear old man; nor, so far as that goes, was he for some time provided with the requisite grounds upon which to base them. All that he realised was that his father was dead, and if he went somewhat beyond the truth in declaring to himself that he had lost his best friend, so much of exaggeration may very well be pardoned to his grief. It is not certain that Sir Brian had been a very good friend to his elder son. He might, if he had taken more trouble to understand the lad, have made him happier, and educated him into a less helpless member of society than he now seemed likely to prove; he might have, and indeed ought to have, trained him either to become a country squire or to become something else; yet he had loved him and had been loved by him; and that, when

all is said and done, may be taken as tolerably exhaustive of the question of friendship. Brian's sorrow was far more profound than Gilbert's, as was also his loss. The old man had admired Gilbert and been proud of him; but there had never been much sympathy between them; they had never had foolish tiffs, followed by speedy reconciliations, and the removal of the one left little or nothing of a blank in the life of the other. But to Brian it seemed as if, with his father's death, the world had come to an end. He knew now, as he had never known before, for how much that hasty, irascible, warm-hearted old fellow had counted in all his pleasures and pursuits; he had felt for him that tender sort of affection which one man feels for another whom he thoroughly understands, but by whom he is himself imperfectly understood; and although so much had been said of late about his ultimate succession to the property, he had always regarded that as something that might come to pass years hence, not as an imminent contingency. So during those dark days when the blinds at Beckton were drawn down and the servants went about on creaking tiptoe, whispering hoarsely to one another after the manner of their kind, he shut himself up and would not see anybody-not even Monckton, who called and was received by Gilbert.

Gilbert it was who, having his wits about him, undertook the painful duties which ought to have been discharged by his elder brother. It was necessary that an inquest should be held and that Brian should give evidence at it; it was necessary, too, that preparations should be made for a funeral of old-fashioned pomp and ghastliness, and that letters should be written to relatives and friends inviting them to attend the ceremony. All these things Gilbert saw to, and some people thought it odd that he should take so much upon him.

Brian, if he could have had his way, would have dispensed with all the dismal panoply of mutes and plumes, and would have asked only a few intimate friends to follow his father's body to the grave; but Gilbert, when this was suggested to him, shook his head and said he was afraid it wouldn't do. One must conform to prescribed customs, whatever one's private opinion might be as to their desirability, and although it was true that his brother and he had now no near relations left, they had a certain number of cousins in different parts of England to whom some intimation of their kinsman's demise ought to be conveyed, and who very

likely would not feel bound to come to Beckton on this melancholy occasion.

However, a good many of them did come. They arrived the day before that fixed for the funeral,, wearing an air of conventional concern which some of them had obvious difficulty in maintaining after dinner, and with them came sundry of Sir Brian's old cronies and comrades in arms, Sir Hector Buckle among the rest. Brian took rather a fancy to Sir Hector, whose regret he perceived to be genuine, and who said some laudatory things of his deceased friend in a curiously apologetic tone.

"A smart officer in his day, and as upright and good-hearted a fellow as I've ever known-I don't care who asserts anything else. We all have our faults, and he had his; but I'll answer for it that he always meant to do the straight thing and the right thing. Confound it all!"

Brian did not see the relevance of the last ejaculation, nor could he understand why Sir Hector showed so much kindness and commiseration to him, and was so abrupt, not to say rude, in his manner towards Gilbert; but he supposed that this might be partly accounted for by a candid observation which fell from that veteran in the course of the evening, and which made him smile for the first time since his loss.

"That brother of yours," Sir Hector said, "hasn't much of the Segrave about him. You Segraves are mostly fools and mostly men whom one would die for at a pinch. Your poor dear father was both, as I've told him often enough, and so, I should think, are you, by the look of you. Now your brother, I take it, is no fool, and I'm blessed if I can imagine anybody wanting to die for him!"

On the following day, which was wild, grey, and gloomy, with occasional splashes of rain, the funeral procession took its slow way to the little church beneath which so many generations of Brians and Gilberts lie buried, and was really imposing after a fashion, despite all the undertaker's desperate efforts to render it ridiculous. The tenantry preceded the hearse; behind it walked the two brothers, side by side and bareheaded; a large gathering of their relatives, friends, and acquaintances followed them on foot; then came six empty mourning coaches and then a line of carriages, representing every magnate and semi-magnate in the county. In Kingscliff flags were flying at half-mast, and most of the shops were closed. Their owners lined the roadside from the mansion to the

churchyard, and not a few of them seemed to be unaffectedly distressed. In these days a man can hardly hope to be popular unless he spends money freely, and Sir Brian had never had much money to spend ; but Kingscliff, notwithstanding Buswellian influences and innovations, still maintained something of an old-world character, and mourned its autocratic, obstinate, but not ungenerous lord of the manor, without perhaps very well knowing why. Monckton, a Monckton, a shrewd observer, attributes this phenomenon (which is not likely to recur) to the fact that Sir Brian Segrave was a gentleman, but declines to explain his meaning more fully on being pressed.

When all was over, when the neighbours, high and low, had dispersed, and the blinds at Beckton had once more been drawn up, those who had spent the previous night there assembled in the library to hear the will of the late owner read by Mr. Potter. As they knew that none of their names would be mentioned in it, they took but a languid interest in the proceedings, only three of the persons present-Gilbert Segrave, Sir Hector Buckle, and Mr. Potter himself-betraying a certain amount of uneasiness. As for Brian, it will perhaps hardly be believed, but it is nevertheless the case, that he regarded this formality as simply tedious and unnecessary.

The lawyer began to say that it was not for him to offer any remarks upon the disposition which his late client had thought fit to make of his property. His duty was merely to make known the provisions of the will, which were few in number and of very recent date. He then read out a list of legacies to various servants, and concluded with, "And the residue of my estate both real and personal (here followed a dense cloud of legal phraseology) I give and bequeath to my son Gilbert for his sole use and behoof." And then came further high-sounding words, designed to avert any misconception of the above plain declaration.

arose

A subdued, inarticulate murmur from the audience, succeeded by a hush. Then one old gentleman raised his hand to his ear and asked, very slowly and distinctly, "Do I understand that my late kinsman has constituted his second son sole heir to his property, and that the name of the elder son does not even appear in the will to which we have been listening?"

Mr. Potter replied that that was so. "Oh, indeed!" said the old gentleman. "Oh, indeed!"

which men and women of average probity are continually committing; one discovers that the vast majority of mankind are for ever deceiving themselves and others, some wilfully, some almost blamelessly; one's own conscience, it may be, is not quite clear, and so toleration—or, as most of us prefer to call it, charity-becomes possible.

Now, as Brian stood there with his hands in his pockets, gazing out at the blurred. prospect of cliff and sea, the devil was not far from his elbow; and perhaps some very witty persons might say that, under the circumstances, the arrival of an attorney upon the scene was in strict accordance with the fitness of things. But the witty persons would be wrong, for Mr. Potter was as honest a little lawyer as ever pocketed an easilyearned thirteen and fourpence, and he had walked out now, at the risk of getting his feet wet and catching cold, with intentions which were not evil, but entirely good.

He began in that half-soothing, half-chiding tone which he so often found it necessary to employ in addressing his clients. "Now, my dear sir, what is the good of brooding? I grant you that you have had a stroke of bad luck, shocking bad luck; but it must be faced-it must be faced. Things might be worse. There is this Manor House property, for instance. I really think-and you know that I am not given to offering hasty opinions about such matters-I really do think that, by exercising proper care and selling at the right moment, you might make it realise a sum which would at least render you independent. Now that is something, isn't it?"

Brian turned to his comforter with a rather bitter smile. "You don't lose time, Mr. Potter," said he. "My father has hardly been dead a week and already you suggest that I should do the thing which of all others would have grieved him most."

"That is all very fine," returned Mr. Potter; "but what do you propose to live upon, my young friend? Upon your brother's charity?

The question stung Brian, as it was perhaps intended to do. "Most certainly not," he answered almost fiercely. Then, after a short pause: "Mr. Potter, you heard what I said to them all just now. It was the simple truth. My father meant to cancel the will that you read; he told me so, and he told Gilbert so. Yet every one of you behaved as though that were to count for nothing. I don't understand it, and I don't believe that Gilbert would condescend to rob me. Tell me frankly: do you think that any

honest man could do what you seem to assume that he will do?"

"When you put that question, do you address me in my capacity as a lawyer or as a private individual?" inquired Mr. Potter. "Really," answered Brian impatiently, "I don't see what the law has to say to the matter. The law doesn't make a man honest or dishonest, I suppose."

"Oh, pardon me; that is just what it does. As a private individual, I may fix my own standard of honesty; the law, on the other hand, establishes a standard for me. Supposing, for example, that you were foolish. enough to bring an action against your brother for the recovery of the property which he now holds. You wouldn't have the shadow of a case; you couldn't even bring evidence in support of your allegation; and the law would tell your brother that he left the court without a stain upon his character. I assure you that there are two kinds of honest men, if not more."

"That means that if Gilbert retained possession of the property, he wouldn't be an honest man in the ordinary acceptation of the term."

"I did not say that. I don't know that he intends to retain possession of the property. Should he decide to do so, I must respectfully decline to be his judge. What I can tell you is that he has a clear legal title to it, that you have none, and in short, that it could only pass into your hands by means of a deed of gift."

"Mr. Potter," said Brian, "does he or does he not mean to take advantage of his legal title?"

"I tell you I don't know. All he said to me was that he must take time to consider his position, which, in my opinion, was a very sensible speech to make. Come, come, my dear boy; your brother is not a Don Quixote; but he is a very decent sort of person, so far as I know-about as decent as they make them. Were I in your place, I should expect little and say less. If he makes up his mind to keep what he has got, he will be able to give you excellent reasons for his decision, you may be sure. They generally can."

Brian took the old lawyer's arm and broke into a laugh. "You are trying to be cynical and to prepare me for the worst," said he; "but do you know, I think you are rather overdoing your part. I know very well that you think just as I do. I don't really dis trust Gilbert, and I'm sorry that I spoke as if I did. The truth is that he is a cautious fellow, and it wouldn't be a bit like him to