s, and the continual unharnessing consequent on the
clause in the Regulations never to wear the same gloves twice; all
these, without counting the close battles of the Corner and the
unremitting requirements of the Turf, worked the First Life and the
rest of the Brigades, Horse and Foot, so hard and incessantly that some
almost thought of changing into the dreary depot of St. Stephen's; and
one mutinous Coldstreamer was even rash enough and false enough to his
colors to meditate deserting to the enemy's camp, and giving himself up
at St. George's--"because a fellow once hanged is let alone, you know!"

The Household were very hard pressed through the season--a crowded and
brilliant one; and Cecil was in request most of all. Bertie, somehow
or other, was the fashion--marvelous and indefinable word, that gives a
more powerful crown than thrones, blood, beauty, or intellect can ever
bestow. And no list was "the thing" without his name; no reception,
no garden party, no opera-box, or private concert, or rose-shadowed
boudoir, fashionably affiche without being visited by him. How he, in
especial, had got his reputation it would have been hard to say, unless
it were that he dressed a shade more perfectly than anyone, and with
such inimitable carelessness in the perfection, too, and had an almost
unattainable matchlessness in the sangfroid of his soft, languid
insolence, and incredible, though ever gentle, effrontery. However
gained, he had it; and his beautiful hack Sahara, his mail-phaeton with
two blood grays dancing in impatience over the stones, or his little
dark-green brougham for night-work, were, one or another of them, always
seen from two in the day till four or five in the dawn about the park or
the town.

And yet this season, while he made a prima donna by a bravissima,
introduced a new tie by an evening's wear, gave a cook the cordon
with his praise, and rendered a fresh-invented liqueur the rage by his
recommendation, Bertie knew very well that he was ruined.

The breach between his father and himself was irrevocable. He had left
Royallieu as soon as his guests had quitted it and young Berkeley was
out of all danger. He had long known he could look for no help from the
old lord, or from his elder brother, the heir; and now every chance of
it was hopelessly closed; nothing but the whim or the will of those who
held his floating paper, and the tradesmen who had his name on their
books at compound interest of the