“Very good. Make a list of them here,” handing him a piece of paper.
”—And that is all? Yes? Then I need not detain you here any further—except again to impress upon you the necessity of attending to what I have been saying.”
Hubert went out of his father’s presence with hot, seething rage at his heart. He to be confined to the house every morning like a schoolboy, with a set task to do. “Gated,” in fact—and that by his own father, and in his home. It was humiliating in the extreme. And there was no way in which the devil within him could find vent.
“Well, dear?” said his mother enquiringly, as he burst into the morning-room, where she had been anxiously awaiting the result of the interview. “And now I hope things are all right.”
“All right?” echoed Hubert, his countenance ablaze with wrath and disgust. “All right? No, they’re not, they’re as wrong as they can be. Here am I set down to work every morning like a wretched schoolboy. I swear, it’s damnable the way in which he treats me.”
“Oh, Hubert—hush!” cried his mother and sister in one breath, both horror-stricken.
“Hush? Oh yes! Aren’t we horrified?” he said jeeringly. “Women are so very easily shocked, I know. Faugh?” and he flung himself from the room.
But it was not on his younger son’s account that General Dorrien had come down that morning “in a state of thundercloud,” as that graceless delinquent had facetiously put it; and to let the reader into the real cause, it will be necessary for him or her to assist in the discussion which took place previous to the unlucky Hubert being summoned to the library.
“I don’t really know what to think, much less what to Bay or do,” said the General. “You saw for yourself, Eleanor; you saw them together. Now, what do you make of it?”
“Well, I do think it’s too bad of Roland, and shows a great want of proper feeling on his part. After all these years he has been away he does not give us much of his society. He seems to be quite taken up with those—people,” answered Mrs Dorrien, though, to do her justice, she answered with some reserve. Her heart was cold towards her eldest son, and not one spark of love had she for him; all was lavished on the younger. Yet, she told herself, she hoped she had a conscience.