f, and lifted his head with as haughty a gesture
as his father's, his features perfectly composed again, and sterner than
in all his careless, easy life they ever yet had looked.

"You lie, and you know you lie. My mother was pure as the angels.
Henceforth you can be only to me a slanderer who has dared to taint the
one name holy in my sight."

And without another word, he turned and went out of the chamber. Yet,
as the door closed, old habit was so strong on him that, even in his hot
and bitter pain, and his bewildered sense of sudden outrage, he almost
smiled at himself. "It is a mania; he does not know what he says," he
thought. "How could I be so melodramatic? We were like two men at the
Porte St. Martin. Inflated language is such bad form!"

But the cruel stroke had not struck the less closely home, and gentle
though his nature was, beyond all forgiveness from him was the dishonor
of his mother's memory.

CHAPTER VII.

AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER.

It was the height of the season, and the duties of the Household were
proportionately and insupportably heavy. The Brigades were fairly worked
to death, and the Indian service, in the heat of the Afghan war, was
never more onerous than the campaigns that claimed the Guards from Derby
to Ducal.

Escorts to Levees, guards of honor to Drawing rooms, or field-days in
the Park and the Scrubs, were but the least portion of it. Far more
severe, and still less to be shirked, were the morning exercise in the
Ride; the daily parade in the Lady's Mile; the reconnaissances from
club windows, the vedettes at Flirtation Corner; the long campaigns at
mess-breakfasts, with the study of dice and baccarat tactics, and the
fortifications of Strasburg pate against the invasions of Chartreuse and
Chambertin; the breathless, steady charges of Belgravian staircases when
a fashionable drum beat the rataplan; the skirmishes with sharpshooters
of the bright-eyed Irregular Lancers; the foraging duty when fair
commanders wanted ices or strawberries at garden parties; the
ball-practice at Hornsey Handicaps; the terrible risk of crossing the
enemy's lines, and being made to surrender as prisoners of war at the
jails of St. George's, or of St. Paul's, Knightsbridge; the constant
inspections of the Flying Battalions of the Ballet, and the pickets
afterward in the Wood of St. John; the anxieties of the Club
commissariats, and the close vigilance over the mess wines; the fatigue
duty of ballroom