(2) Gerald George.
(3) Francis Lionel Desmond Edward.
Daughter:
Beatrix Cicely.
“Dear little duckies!” he had murmured, biting a cigarette. “Sweet little babes! Precious little poppets! Damn ’em the whole blooming lot!”
But he had been quite alone when he had said this: for a man who drank so much as he did he was always remarkably discreet. What he drank did not make him garrulous; it made him suspicious and mute. No one had ever known him allow a word to escape his lips which he would, being sober, have regretted to have said. How many abstemious persons amongst us can boast as much?
CHAPTER II.
It was four o’clock on a misty and dark afternoon of the month of March in London.
The reception-rooms of a fine house facing Grosvenor Gate were all lighted by the last modern perfection of rose-shaded electricity. They were rooms of unusually admirable proportions and size for the city in which they were situated, and were decorated and filled with all that modern resources, both in art and in wealth, can obtain.
Harrenden House, as it was called, had been designed for a rich and eccentric duke of that name, and occupied by him for a few years, at the end of which time he had tired of it, had carried all its treasures elsewhere, and put it up for sale; it had remained unsold and unlet for a very long period, the price asked being too large even for millionaires. At last, in the autumn of the previous year, it had been taken by a person who was much more than a millionaire, though he had been born in a workhouse and had begun life as a cow-boy.