"I repeat to you, that you need give yourself no anxiety about the
seat," said Lady Montfort. "It will not cost you a shilling. I and your
sister have arranged all that. As she very wisely said, 'It must be
done,' and it is done. All you have to do is to write an address, and
make plenty of speeches, and you are M.P. for life, or as long as you
like."

"Possibly; a parliamentary adventurer, I might swim or I might sink; the
chances are it would be the latter, for storms would arise, when those
disappear who have no root in the country, and no fortune to secure them
breathing time and a future."

"Well, I did not expect, when you handed me out of my carriage to-day,
that I was going to listen to a homily on prudence."

"It is not very romantic, I own," said Endymion, "but my prudence is
at any rate not a commonplace caught up from copy-books. I am only
two-and-twenty, but I have had some experience, and it has been very
bitter. I have spoken to you, dearest lady, sometimes of my earlier
life, for I wished you to be acquainted with it, but I observed also you
always seemed to shrink from such confidence, and I ceased from touching
on what I saw did not interest you."

"Quite a mistake. It greatly interested me. I know all about you and
everything. I know you were not always a clerk in a public office, but
the spoiled child of splendour. I know your father was a dear good man,
but he made a mistake, and followed the Duke of Wellington instead of
Mr. Canning. Had he not, he would probably be alive now, and certainly
Secretary of State, like Mr. Sidney Wilton. But _you_ must not make a
mistake, Endymion. My business in life, and your sister's too, is to
prevent your making mistakes. And you are on the eve of making a very
great one if you lose this golden opportunity. Do not think of the past;
you dwell on it too much. Be like me, live in the present, and when you
dream, dream of the future."

"Ah! the present would be adequate, it would be fascination, if I always
had such a companion as Lady Montfort," said Endymion, shaking his head.
"What surprises me most, what indeed astounds me, is that Myra should
join in this counsel--Myra, who knows all, and who has felt it perhaps
deeper even than I did. But I will not obtrude these thoughts on
you, best and dearest of friends. I ought not to have made to you the
allusions to my private position which I have done, but it seemed to me
the only way to explain my conduct, otherw