“I’m sure I don’t know why he should be,” the Duke muttered, but he let his voice drop at the sight of his mother’s sorrowful face.
“I would see him myself,” the Prince added, “only I have to leave for Birmingham to-morrow to lay the foundation stone of a cathedral, and I am under engagements which will keep me in the district for several days.”
The Duchess rose and walked across the room to where her son was seated, tapping a fretful foot upon the floor. She laid her hand on his arm, and looked him beseechingly in the face.
“My son, my eldest son!” she murmured softly. “You need not be jealous of the poor prodigal. Say that you will go?”
And James said that he would go.
That night Alistair’s mother did not sleep.
The bankrupt himself slept heavily after emptying a bottle of champagne, at whose expense he no longer hesitated. The new Minister tossed to and fro till the excitement of debate had evaporated, and then sank into a calm, health-giving slumber. Prince Herbert slept too; if he had passed a troubled night the wires would have flashed the news next day from Auckland to Vancouver.
But the Duchess of Trent could not sleep. She spent a night of fear and sorrow, her mind haunted by the terrible word that spelt the wreck of her darling—the word wife.
Rather than see her son married to Molly Finucane she could have prayed that he might be taken from the world. To her apprehension such a marriage meant ruin final and irretrievable, ruin social, moral and religious, ruin in this life and the next.