ng 'to do.' Every actor in the drama
has something to do, which helps on the progress of the whole: that is
the object for which the author created him. Do your part, and let the
Great Play get on."

"Ah!" said Trevanion, briskly, "but to do the part is the difficulty.
Every actor helps to the catastrophe, and yet must do his part without
knowing how all is to end. Shall he help the curtain to fall on a
tragedy or a comedy? Come, I will tell you the one secret of my public
life, that which explains all its failure (for, in spite of my position,
I have failed) and its regrets,--I want Conviction!"

"Exactly," said my father; "because to every question there are two
sides, and you look at them both."

"You have said it," answered Trevanion, smiling also. "For public life
a man should be one-sided: he must act with a party; and a party insists
that the shield is silver, when, if it will take the trouble to turn the
corner, it will see that the reverse of the shield is gold. Woe to the
man who makes that discovery alone, while his party are still swearing
the shield is silver, and that not once in his life, but every night!

"You have said quite enough to convince me that you ought not to belong
to a party, but not enough to convince me why you should not be happy,"
said my father.

"Do you remember," said Sir Sedley Beaudesert, "an anecdote of the first
Duke of Portland? He had a gallery in the great stable of his villa in
Holland, where a concert was given once a week, to cheer and amuse his
horses! I have no doubt the horses thrived all the better for it. What
Trevanion wants is a concert once a week. With him it is always saddle
and spur. Yet, after all, who would not envy him? If life be a drama,
his name stands high in the play-bill, and is printed in capitals on the
walls."

"Envy me!" said Trevanion,--"Me! No, you are the enviable man,--you, who
have only one grief in the world, and that so absurd a one that I will
make you blush by disclosing it. Hear, O sage Austin! O sturdy Roland!
Olivares was haunted by a spectre, and Sedley Beaudesert by the dread of
old age!"

"Well," said my mother, seriously, "I do think it requires a great sense
of religion, or at all events children' of one's own, in whom one is
young again, to reconcile oneself to becoming old."

"My dear ma'am," said Sir Sedley, who had slightly colored at
Trevanion's charge, but had now recovered his easy self-possession,
"you have spoken so