Page:The time spirit; a romantic tale (IA timespiritromant00snaiiala).pdf/118

 *tune. He went to Liverpool, shipped before the mast as an ordinary seaman for the sake of the experience, and made the voyage round the Horn to San Francisco. For the next two years he prospected up and down the America's earning a living, picking up ideas, and enlarging his outlook by association with all sorts and conditions of men, and finally invested all the capital he could scrape together in a business in Vancouver.

After eighteen months of the new life came the news of his father's death. The brothers and sisters it seemed were rather better provided for than there had been reason to expect. At any rate, Mabel and Iris would have a roof over their heads, Bill had passed into Sandhurst, and Frank was at Cambridge. Therefore Jack, little guessing what Fate had in store, decided to stay as he was, in the hope that in a few years he would have made his pile. He had a taste for hard work, and the new land offered opportunities denied by the old.

Some months later he received an urgent summons to return home. He had suddenly and unexpectedly become next of kin to the Duke of Bridport. The news was little to the young man's taste. He was very loth to give up a growing business for a life of parasitic idleness under the ægis of the titular great. But the circumstances seemed to make it imperative. The powers that were had not the slightest doubt that it was his bounden duty to go into training at once. He must fit himself for the dizzy eminence to which it had pleased Providence to call him.

Sadly enough the tiro sold out, returned to England, and in due course reported himself at Bridport House. It was the first time he had been there. He was such