She had died in childbirth when he was nine; her baby had died with her, and her husband, Lord Maxwell's only son and surviving child, fell a victim two years later to a deadly form of throat disease, one of those ills which come upon strong men by surprise, and excite in the dying a sense of helpless wrong which even religious faith can only partially soothe.
Aldous remembered his mother's death; still more his father's, that father who could speak no last message to his son, could only lie dumb upon his pillows, with those eyes full of incommunicable pain, and the hand now restlessly seeking, now restlessly putting aside the small and trembling hand of the son.

His boyhood had been spent under the shadow of these events, which had aged his grandfather, and made him too early realise himself as standing alone in the gap of loss, the only hope left to affection and to ambition.

This premature development, amid the most melancholy surroundings, of the sense of personal importance--not in any egotistical sense, but as a sheer matter of fact--had robbed a nervous and sensitive temperament of natural stores of gaiety and elasticity which it could ill do without.

Aldous Raeburn had been too much thought for and too painfully loved.

But for Edward Hallin he might well have acquiesced at manhood in a certain impaired vitality, in the scholar's range of pleasures, and the landowner's customary round of duties.
It was to Edward Hallin he was writing to-night, for the stress and stir of feeling caused by the events of the day, and not least by his grandfather's outburst, seemed to put sleep far off.