Then he resumed his former seat, and attitude, and Brooks, though he tried to speak, felt his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth, a dry and nerveless thing.
For in these doings there was tragedy.
"There remains to me you, Philip Kingston, my son," Lord Arranmore said, in the same measured tone.

"You also have before you the story of my life, you are able from it to form some sort of idea as to what my future is likely to be.

I do not wish to deceive you.

My early enthusiasms are extinct.

I look upon the ten or twenty years or so which may be left to me of life as merely a space of time to be filled with as many amusements and new sensations as may be procurable without undue effort.