t home as he could. He patronised Lady, Mabel, who
was his junior by five years, rode her thorough-bred pony for her under
the pretence of improving its manners, until he took a header with it
into a bog, out of which pony and boy rolled and struggled
indiscriminately, boy none the worse, pony lamed for life. He played
billiards with the Duke, and told the Duchess all his school
adventures, practical jokes, fights, apple-pie beds, booby-traps,
surreptitious fried sausages, and other misdemeanours.

Out of this friendship arose a brilliant vision which reconciled Lady
Jane Vawdrey to her son's preference for his aunt's house and his
aunt's society. Why should he not marry Mabel by-and-by, and unite the
two estates of Ashbourne and Briarwood, and become owner of the pits
and the mine, and distinguish himself in the senate, and be created a
peer? As the husband of Lady Mabel Ashbourne, he would be rich enough
to command a peerage, almost as a right; but his mother would have had
him deserve it. With this idea Lady Jane urged on her son's education.
All his Hampshire friends called him clever, but he won no laurels at
school. Lady Jane sent for grinders and had the boy ground; but all the
grinding could not grind a love of classics or metaphysics into this
free son of the forest. He went to Oxford, and got himself ploughed for
his Little Go, with a wonderful facility. For politics he cared not a
jot, but he could drive tandem better than any other undergraduate of
his year. He never spoke at the Union, but he pulled stroke in the
'Varsity boat. He was famous for his biceps, his good-nature, and his
good looks; but so far he had distinguished himself for nothing else,
and to this stage of nonperformance had he come when the reader first
beheld him.

CHAPTER III.

"I Want a Little Serious Talk with You."

It was only half-past nine when the brougham drove up to the pillared
porch at Briarwood. The lighted drawing-room windows shone out upon the
vaporous autumn darkness--a row of five tall French casements--and the
sound of a piano caught Roderick's ear as he tossed the end of his
cigar in the shrubbery, and mounted the wide stone door-steps.

"At it again," muttered Rorie with a shrug of disgust, as he entered
the hall, and heard, through the half-open drawing-room door, an
interlacement of pearly runs. At this stage of his existence, Rorie had
no appreciation of brilliant pianoforte playing. The music he liked
best