Val had looked into the dark, passionate face.
“You are not an utter fool, Mark, so I shall not trouble to argue this sort of point with you,” he said, quietly. “As to the other suggestion you have made, I hope from my heart that the day will come when you will be happy with a wife to love you, and children to call you father. But that must not be yet, Mark, my lad,” Val had added quietly, but sternly. “You have to take a good pull at yourself, Mark, and just pause and look ahead of you. Why don’t you pack up your traps and come abroad with us? We should be so jolly together, you, Grace and myself, and——”
“And the Dean’s Chapter, too, I suppose, to shrive me perpetually of my sins, eh?” Mark had queried with a pronounced sneer. Then he had used a very bad word, and he had told Val to “go to the devil!” and he had swung himself away to end further argument.
All this—save what concerned a certain woman about whom Val could not bring himself to speak to his sister—had been told to Grace, and the girl had only too well grasped the difficulties of the position.
“But you have done your best, you are doing all you can now, Val,” she had said, consolingly. “You cannot make yourself Mark’s keeper. Write to Mr. Baker and tell him he must fill your trust as well as his own while you are abroad. I will write to Sacha and ask him to be as much with Mark as he can. It is just possible,” Grace had added, thoughtfully, “that Mark may take a little turn for the better if you are away for a time. With some natures restraint has a bad effect if urged too much. Mark has grown impatient lately. If you will let me advise you, dear, you will say no more to him, but come away with me, and trust to his own good sense to realize the danger of his position.”
And Val had accepted this counsel.
He had done all Grace had suggested, and he had gone abroad, with a sigh of relief. Determined that no evil feeling between Mark and himself should be fostered by any act of his, Val wrote frequently to his cousin, as Grace did to her grandmother, poor old Lady Wentworth, but Mark vouchsafed no answers, and such news as they had received of him had come through Val’s fellow trustee, Mr. Baker, and from Sacha, when he remembered to write at all.
The news was not cheering.
Mark had plunged headlong into a vortex of dissipation, and the end of this had been a sharp illness, which his grandmother called fever, but which Val knew, alas! only too well, had been an attack of delirium tremens.
Grace and he had been too far away to return at that time, and indeed he was kept abroad much longer than he had anticipated, owing to an increase of work required of him by the firm.