irit of contradiction which is inborn in
human nature, he is inclined to disbelieve all that Nina Curzon has told
him. Lustoff and Sabaroff probably both deserved their fates, and the
departure from the court of St. Petersburg might very possibly have been
voluntary. He has a vague feeling of tenderness for the original of the
photograph. It often happens to him to fall sentimentally and
ephemerally in love with some unknown woman whose portrait he has seen
or of whose charms he has heard. Sometimes he has avoided knowing these
in their actual life, lest he should disturb his ideals. He is an
imaginative man with a great amount of leisure in which to indulge his
fancies, and his knowledge of the world has not hardened his feelings or
dulled his fancy. There is something of the Montrose, of the Lord
Surrey, in him.

"To think of all one knows about that hussy," he muses, as he smokes a
cigar in his bedroom before dressing for dinner. By the uncomplimentary
epithet he means Mrs. Wentworth Curzon. "Such a good fellow as Fred
Curzon is, too, a man who might have been made anything of if she'd only
treated him decently. When he married her he adored the ground she
walked on, but before a week was out she began to fret him, and jar at
him, and break him in, as she called it; he was too poor for her, and
too slow for her, and too good for her, and she was vilely cruel to
him,--it's only women who can be cruel like that, she's had more lovers
than anybody living, and she's taken every one of 'em for money; nothing
but money. Old Melton gave her the Park-Lane House, and Glamorgan gave
her her emeralds, and Dartmoor paid her Paris bills for ten years, and
Riverston takes all her stable-expenses. Everything she does is done for
money; and if she puts any heart at all now into this thing with
Lawrence, it is only because she's getting older and so getting
jealous,--they always do as they get on,--and then she calls Russians
dissolute and depraved, good Lord!"

With which he casts aside his cigar, and resigns himself to his
servant's hands as the second gong sounds.

CHAPTER VI.

The very bachelor rooms at Surrenden are conducive to revery and
indolence, cosily comfortable and full of little attentions for the
guest's _bien-etre_, among which there is a printed paper which is
always laid on the dressing-table in every room at this house: it
contains the latest telegrams of public news, which come every afternoon
from a