of between thirteen and fourteen which he did not relinquish, though
to the present day his conscious self keeps dinging it into him that the
less he smokes the better.

And so matters went on till my hero was nearly fourteen years old. If by
that time he was not actually a young blackguard, he belonged to a
debateable class between the sub-reputable and the upper disreputable,
with perhaps rather more leaning to the latter except so far as vices of
meanness were concerned, from which he was fairly free. I gather this
partly from what Ernest has told me, and partly from his school bills
which I remember Theobald showed me with much complaining. There was an
institution at Roughborough called the monthly merit money; the maximum
sum which a boy of Ernest's age could get was four shillings and
sixpence; several boys got four shillings and few less than sixpence, but
Ernest never got more than half-a-crown and seldom more than eighteen
pence; his average would, I should think, be about one and nine pence,
which was just too much for him to rank among the downright bad boys, but
too little to put him among the good ones.

CHAPTER XXXII

I must now return to Miss Alethea Pontifex, of whom I have said perhaps
too little hitherto, considering how great her influence upon my hero's
destiny proved to be.

On the death of her father, which happened when she was about thirty-two
years old, she parted company with her sisters, between whom and herself
there had been little sympathy, and came up to London. She was
determined, so she said, to make the rest of her life as happy as she
could, and she had clearer ideas about the best way of setting to work to
do this than women, or indeed men, generally have.

Her fortune consisted, as I have said, of 5000 pounds, which had come to
her by her mother's marriage settlements, and 15,000 pounds left her by
her father, over both which sums she had now absolute control. These
brought her in about 900 pounds a year, and the money being invested in
none but the soundest securities, she had no anxiety about her income.
She meant to be rich, so she formed a scheme of expenditure which
involved an annual outlay of about 500 pounds, and determined to put the
rest by. "If I do this," she said laughingly, "I shall probably just
succeed in living comfortably within my income." In accordance with this
scheme she took unfurnished apartments in a house in Gower Street, of
which the l