"Of course she would; there's nothing in that."
"No, I suppose not," he admitted almost reluctantly.
"I can't help thinking I've heard the name before—not Zabriska, but the uncle's."
"Duplay, isn't it? I never heard it."
"Well, I can't remember anything about it, but it sounds familiar. I'm confusing it with something else, I suppose. They look like being endurable, do they?"
"Oh, yes, as people go," he answered, resuming his walk.
If a determination to keep for yourself what according to your own conviction belongs by law to another makes a criminal intent—and that irrespective of the merits of the law—it would be hard to avoid classing Lady Tristram and her son as criminals in contemplation, if not yet in action. And so considered they afforded excellent specimens of two kinds of criminals which a study of assize courts reveals—the criminal who drifts and the criminal who plans; the former
usually termed by counsel and judge "unhappy," the latter more sternly dubbed "dangerous." Lady Tristram had always drifted and was drifting still; Harry had begun to plan at fifteen and still was busy planning. One result of this difference was that whereas she was hardly touched or affected in character he had been immensely influenced. In her and to her the whole thing seemed almost accidental, a worry, as she put it, and not much more; with him it was the governing fact in life, and had been the force most potent in moulding him. The trouble came into her head when something from outside put it there; it never left his brain. And she had no adequate conception of what it was to him. Even his scheme of marrying Janie Iver and his vivid little phrase about living with the check by him failed to bring it home to her. This very evening, as soon as he was out of sight, both he and his great question were out of the mind of the woman who had brought both him and it into existence. There are people who carry the doctrine of free-will so far in their own persons as to take the liberty of declining to allow causes to work on and in them, what are logically, morally, and on every other ground conceivable, their necessary effects; reasoning from what they have done to what they must be, from what they have been responsible for to what they must feel, breaks down; they are arbitrary, unconditioned, themselves as it were accidental. With this comes a sort of innocence, sometimes attractive, sometimes uncommonly exasperating to the normal man.
So Lady Tristram went back to her novel, and Harry walked by the river, moodily meditating and busily scheming. Meanwhile Mina Zabriska had flown to the library at Merrion Lodge, and, finding books that had belonged to a legal member of the
family in days gone by, was engaged in studying the law relating to the succession to lands and titles in England. She did not make quick progress. Nevertheless in a day or two she had reached a point when she was bubbling over with curiosity and excitement; she felt that she could not go on sitting opposite Major Duplay at meals without giving him at least a hint or two of the wonderful state of things on which she had hit, and without asking him to consider the facts and to have a look at the books which were so puzzling and exercising her brain. Yet Harry Tristram, wary sentinel as he was, did not dream of any attack or scent any danger from the needle with two very large eyes, as he had called the lady at Merrion Lodge.