chattered about
the pictures; he gossiped about their owners; he excused himself for
the absence of "that gad-about Blanche"; he made her promise him a
Whitsuntide visit instead, and whispered in her ear, "You shall have
_her_ room"; he paid her the most handsome and gallant attentions,
natural to the man of fashion _par excellence_, mingled with something
intimate, brusque, capricious, which marked her his own, and of the
family. Seventy-five!--with that step, that carriage of the shoulders,
that vivacity! Ridiculous!

And Julie could not but respond.

Something stole into her heart that had never yet lodged there. She must
love the old man--she did. When he left her for the Duchess her eyes
followed him--her dark-rimmed, wistful eyes.

"I must be off," said Lord Lackington, presently, buttoning up his coat.
"This, ladies, has been dalliance. I now go to my duties. Read me in the
_Times_ to-morrow. I shall make a rattling speech. You see, I shall
rub it in."

"Montresor?" said the Duchess.

Lord Lackington nodded. That afternoon he proposed to strew the floor of
the House of Lords with the _debris_ of Montresor's farcical reforms.

Suddenly he pulled himself up.

"Duchess, look round you, at those two in the doorway. Isn't it--by
George, it is!--Chudleigh and his boy!"

"Yes--yes, it is," said the Duchess, in some excitement. "Don't
recognize them. Don't speak to him. Jacob implored me not."

And she hurried her companions along till they were well out of the
track of the new-comers; then on the threshold of another room she
paused, and, touching Julie on the arm, said, in a whisper:

"Now look back. That's Jacob's Duke, and his poor, poor boy!"

Julie threw a hurried glance towards the two figures; but that glance
impressed forever upon her memory a most tragic sight.

A man of middle height, sallow, and careworn, with jet-black hair and
beard, supported a sickly lad, apparently about seventeen, who clung to
his arm and coughed at intervals. The father moved as though in a dream.
He looked at the pictures with unseeing, lustreless eyes, except when
the boy asked him a question. Then he would smile, stoop his head and
answer, only to resume again immediately his melancholy passivity. The
boy, meanwhile, his lips gently parted over his white teeth, his blue
eyes wide open and intent upon the pictures, his emaciated cheeks deeply
flushed, wore an aspect of patient suffering, of docile dependence,
peculiar