Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/296

 situation. I detest practical joking and, when my brother-in-law was announced, I confess that I expected less to be lectured than to receive some little expression of regret. . . Hoped rather than expected. . . You are quite right.

“I must beg for enlightenment,” I said.

“Well, what’s that scamp of a boy of yours been up to?,” he asked. “I will not permit such language about my son!,” I cried.

“Too late now. You should have brought him up better,” he said.

This from Spenworth, whose life has been one dark, unbroken record of debauchery, unfaithfulness. . . not a tenth part known owing to his cleverness in hushing up scandals, impoverishing that glorious estate to buy the silence of those who held awkward secrets. Indeed I know what I am talking about. When he wanted poor Kathleen to divorce him, he gave her the run of Cheniston; heirlooms apart, she might take anything “to feather her new nest”, as he elegantly put it. And this in a house which will come to Arthur and Will if anything happens to that sickly baby. . . There was a marvellous story going the rounds a few months ago that I had tried to entangle Kathleen with the King’s Proctor or the President of the