Page:The time spirit; a romantic tale (IA timespiritromant00snaiiala).pdf/117

 IV

By an odd chain of events, Jack Dinneford was heir apparent to the dukedom of Bridport. In the course of a brief twelve months two intervening lives had petered out. One had been Lyme, the Duke's only surviving son, who at the age of thirty-five had been killed in a shooting accident—a younger son, never a good life, had died some years earlier—the other had been the Duke's younger brother, who six months ago had died without male issue. The succession in consequence would now have to pass to an obscure and rather neglected branch of the family, represented by a young man of twenty-four, the son of a Norfolk parson.

Jack's father, at the time of his death, had held a family living. A retiring, scholarly man, he had never courted the favors of the great, and the great, little suspecting that their vicarious splendors might one day be his, had paid him little attention. Blessed with progeny of the usual clerical abundance and without means apart from his stipend, the incumbent of Wickley-on-the-Wold had been hard set to educate his children in a manner becoming their august lineage. Even Jack, the eldest of five, had to be content with four years at one of the smaller public schools. It was true that afterwards he had the option of Oxford or Sandhurst, but by the time the young man had reached the age of nineteen he had somehow acquired an independence of character which did not take kindly to either.

One fine day, with a spare suit of clothes and a hundred pounds or so in his pocket, he set out in the most casual way to see the world, and to make his for