poverty-stricken creature one feels amongst them! And yet if I ask papa
to give me a couple of napoleons out of the money he won to-day, he
will only look at me from head to foot, and tell me I have a gown and a
cloak and a bonnet, and ask me what more I can want, in the name of all
that is unreasonable? And I see girls here whose fathers are so fond of
them and so proud of them--ugly girls, decked out in silks and muslins
and ribbons that have cost a small fortune--clumsy awkward girls, who
look at _me_ as if I were some new kind of wild animal."

The saloons at Foretdechene were rich in monster sheets of
looking-glass; and in wandering discontentedly about the room Diana
Paget saw herself reflected many times in all her shabbiness. It was
only very lately she had discovered that she had some pretension to
good looks; for her father, who could not or would not educate her
decently or clothe her creditably, took a very high tone of morality in
his paternal teaching, and, in the fear that she might one day grow
vain of her beauty, had taken care to impress upon her at an early age
that she was the very incarnation of all that is lean and sallow and
awkward.

CHAPTER II.

THE EASY DESCENT

Amongst the many imprudences of which Horatio Paget--once a cornet in a
crack cavalry regiment, always a captain in his intercourse with the
world--had been guilty during the course of a long career, there was
none for which he so bitterly reproached himself as for a certain
foolish marriage which he had made late in his life. It was when he had
thrown away the last chance that an indulgent destiny had given him,
that the ruined fop of the Regency, the sometime member of the
Beef-steak Club, the man who in his earliest youth had worn a silver
gridiron at his button-hole, and played piquet in the gilded saloons of
Georgina of Devonshire, found himself laid on a bed of sickness in
dingy London lodgings, and nearer death than he had ever been in the
course of his brief military career; so nearly gliding from life's
swift-flowing river into eternity's trackless ocean, that the warmest
thrill of gratitude which ever stirred the slow pulses of his cold
heart quickened its beating as he clasped the hand that had held him
back from the unknown region whose icy breath had chilled him with an
awful fear. Such men as Horatio Paget are apt to feel a strange terror
when the black night drops suddenly down upon them, and the "Gray
Boatma