rder
of things, he went on to Christ Church, his rooms were the envy and the
admiration of the university. As a matter of fact, he never knew what
it was to have to deny himself anything; and it says something for the
lad's nature, and the father's too, I think, that he should have come
out of it the honest, simple Englishman he was. Then old John died;
his wife followed suit six months later; and on his twenty-fifth
birthday the young man found himself standing alone in the world with
his millions ready to his hand either to make or mar him. Little
though he thought it at the time, there was a sufficiency of trouble in
store for him.

He had town houses, country seats, moors and salmon-fishings, yachts
(steam and sailing), racehorses, hunters, coach-horses, polo-ponies,
and an army of servants that a man might very well shudder even to
think of. But he lacked one thing; he had no wife. Society, however,
was prepared to remedy this defect. Indeed, it soon showed that it was
abnormally anxious to do so. Before he was twenty-two it had been
rumoured that he had become engaged to something like a score of girls,
each one lovelier, sweeter, and boasting blood that was bluer than the
last. A wiser and an older head might well have been forgiven had it
succumbed to the attacks made upon it; but in his veins, mingled with
the aristocratic Rushbrooke blood, young John had an equal portion of
that of the old soap-boiler; and where the one led him to accept
invitations to country houses at Christmas, or to be persuaded into
driving his fair friends, by moonlight, to supper at the Star and
Garter, the other enabled him to take very good care of himself while
he ran such dangerous risks. In consequence he had attained the
advanced age of twenty-eight when this story opens, a bachelor, and
with every prospect of remaining so. But the Blind Bow-Boy, as every
one is aware, discharges his bolts from the most unexpected quarters;
and for this reason you are apt to find yourself mortally wounded in
the very place, of all others, where you have hitherto deemed yourself
most invulnerable.

It was the end of the second week in August; Parliament was up; and
Browne's steam-yacht, the _Lotus Blossom_, twelve hundred tons, lay in
the harbour of Merok, on the Gieranger Fjord, perhaps the most
beautiful on the Norwegian coast. The guests on board had been
admirably chosen, an art which in most instances is not cultivated as
careful