Lady Kesters was about to speak, but with a hasty gesture her uncle interposed.
“I may as well add that I think myself safe in offering this prize, for it’s my belief that Owen will never win it. He has the family fever in his veins—the rage for gambling—and he is like the patriarch Reuben, ‘unstable as water and cannot excel.’ At the end of six months he will be penniless, and you and Kesters will have to come to his rescue; for my part I wash my hands of him.”
“Uncle Dick,” she said, rising, “I think you are too hard on Owen; he would not have come back from South America if he had not had a row with the manager of the Estancia: surely you could not expect an English gentleman—an Englishman—to stand by and see a poor woman nearly beaten to death?”
“Oh,” with an impatient whirl of his glasses, “the fellow has always as many excuses as an Irishman!”
“I think you are unjust,” she said, with a flash in her dark eyes. “I admit that Owen has been extravagant and foolish, but he was not worse, or half as bad, as many young men in his position. Are you quite determined? Won’t you give Owen another chance—or even half a chance?”
“No; his future is now in his own hands, and I stick to what I’ve said,” he declared, with irritable vehemence. “You came here, my clever Leila, to talk me over. Oh, you are good at that, but it’s no go this time! I am honestly giving the boy his only remedy. Let me see,” sitting down at his bureau, “what is the date? Yes—look here—I make an entry. I give Owen two years from to-day to work out his time—to-day is the thirty-first of March.”
“But why not wait until to-morrow, and make it the first of April?” suggested his niece, with a significant and seductive smile.
“Leila,” he spluttered, “I’m astonished at you! You jeer at me because I’m not disposed to keep your beloved brother as an ‘objêt de luxe,’ eh?”
“I don’t jeer, Uncle Dick, and I am sorry my tongue was too many for me; but I can see both sides of the question, and it is hard that, after indulging Owen as a boy, sending him to Eton, putting him into the Hussars, and letting him become accustomed to the Service, sport, and society, you suddenly pull up and throw him out in the world to sink or swim. What can he do?”
“That is for him to find out, and, since he wouldn’t pull up, I must.”