Page:The council of seven.djvu/129

 felt a weight lifted suddenly from her mind. And yet, if this theory was sound, it was one rag the more torn from the reputation of a man whom she had implicitly trusted.

"I sometimes think," Lady Elizabeth went on, "that my unfortunate boy gets his eccentricity from his grandfather. All the rest of the family were so sensible. I can hear my Uncle Edmund saying to my father, 'Robert, the world is a good enough place as it is, if only fools like you will let it be.' A shrewd man Uncle Edmund. 'You'll put the workingman on top, and then you'll be happy,' he used to say. If Uncle Edmund could have had his way he would have hanged poor papa at Hyde Park Corner. And that is how I feel about that wretched boy upstairs."

Helen was hard set to keep her gravity. But she was just equal to the task. Moreover, with those sinister words of Saul Hartz still in her ears, there was yet a private end to gain. "Your mother's people"—of malice prepense she paused; it was so important to frame an innocent-seeming question in just the right way—"were much too wise, I suppose, to give away their own?"

"Dear me, yes," was the emphatic answer. "Canny Scotch folk who knew better than to give away anything."

"Due in part, no doubt," said Helen, "to living in a poor country where there may not be much to give.