that he is in the case I am in--wants
something and comes to the fountain of honour to get it.'

And bidding the other good-night, he went to bed; not to sleep, but to
lie awake and reckon and calculate, and add a charge here to interest
there, and set both against income, and find nothing remain.

He had sneered at the old home because it had been in his family only so
many generations. But there is this of evil in an old house--it is bad
to live in, but worse to part from. Sir George, straining his eyes in
the darkness, saw the long avenue of elms and the rooks' nests, and the
startled birds circling overhead; and at the end of the vista the wide
doorway, _aed. temp._ Jac. 1--saw it all more lucidly than he had seen
it since the September morning when he traversed it, a boy of fourteen,
with his first gun on his arm. Well, it was gone; but he was Sir George,
macaroni and fashionable, arbiter of elections at White's, and great at
Almack's, more powerful in his sphere than a belted earl! But, then,
that was gone too, with the money--and--and what was left? Sir George
groaned and turned on his pillow and thought of Bland and Fanny
Braddock. He wondered if any one had ever left the Castle by the suicide
door, and, to escape his thoughts, lit a candle and read 'La Belle
Heloise,' which he had in his mail.

CHAPTER XII

JULIA

It is certain that if Sir George Soane had borne any other name, the
girl, after the conversation which had taken place between them on the
dingy staircase at Oxford, must have hated him. There is a kind of
condescension from man to woman, in which the man says, 'My good girl,
not for me--but do take care of yourself,' which a woman of the least
pride finds to be of all modes of treatment the most shameful and the
most humiliating. The masterful overtures of such a lover as Dunborough,
who would take all by storm, are still natural, though they lack
respect; a woman would be courted, and sometimes would be courted in the
old rough fashion. But, for the other mode of treatment, she may be a
Grizel, or as patient--a short course of that will sharpen not only her
tongue, but her fingernails.

Yet this, or something like it, Julia, who was far from being the most
patient woman in the world, had suffered at Sir George's hands;
believing at the time that he was some one else, or, rather, being
ignorant then and for just an hour afterwards that such a person as Sir
George Soane existed. Enlighten