arranged by a compliant
country for the purpose of aiding his particular, and most honourable,
ambition to climb, while continuing to fill his purse. Mr. Austin broke
down early in the year. He attributed it to a cold. Other representative
gentlemen were on their backs, of whom he could admit that the
protracted nightwork had done them harm, with the reservation that
their constitutions were originally unsound. But the House cannot get on
without lawyers, and lawyers must practise their profession, and if they
manage both to practise all day and sit half the night, others should
be able to do the simple late sitting; and we English are an energetic
people, we must toil or be beaten: and besides, 'night brings counsel,'
men are cooler and wiser by night. Any amount of work can be performed
by careful feeders: it is the stomach that kills the Englishman. Brains
are never the worse for activity; they subsist on it.

These arguments and citations, good and absurd, of a man more at home
in his harness than out of it, were addressed to the colonel to stop his
remonstrances and idle talk about burning the candle at both ends. To
that illustration Mr. Austin replied that he did not burn it in the
middle.

'But you don't want money, Austin.'

'No; but since I've had the habit of making it I have taken to like it.'

'But you're not ambitious.'

'Very little; but I should be sorry to be out of the tideway.'

'I call it a system of slaughter,' said the colonel; and Mr. Austin
said, 'The world goes in that way--love and slaughter.'

'Not suicide though,' Colonel Halkett muttered.

'No, that's only incidental.'

The casual word 'love' led Colonel Halkett to speak to Cecilia of an old
love-affair of Seymour Austin's, in discussing the state of his health
with her. The lady was the daughter of a famous admiral, handsome, and
latterly of light fame. Mr. Austin had nothing to regret in her having
married a man richer than himself.

'I wish he had married a good woman,' said the colonel.

'He looks unwell, papa.'

'He thinks you're looking unwell, my dear.'

'He thinks that of me?'

Cecilia prepared a radiant face for Mr. Austin.

She forgot to keep it kindled, and he suspected her to be a victim of
one of the forms of youthful melancholy, and laid stress on the benefit
to health of a change of scene.

'We have just returned from Wales,' she said.

He remarked that it was hardly a change to be within shot of our
new