passport, he had announced himself cured of
further interest in revolutionary politics. The affair had made him
quite famous for a time, however; Krapotkin had sought him out and
warmly thanked him for his interest in the Russian Geysers, and begged
him to induce his father to abjure his peace policy and lend his hand
to the laudable breaking of Czarism's back. But Lord Cardingham, who
was not altogether ruled by his younger son, had declined to expend
his seductions upon Mr. Gladstone in the cause of a possible laying of
too heavy a rod upon England's back, and had recommended his erratic
son to let the barbarism of absolutism alone in the future, and try
his genius upon that of democracy. Dartmouth, accordingly, had spent
a winter in Washington as Secretary of Legation, and had entertained
himself by doling out such allowance of diplomatic love to the fair
American dames as had won him much biographical honor in the press
of the great republic. Upon his father's private admonition, that it
would be as well to generously resign his position in favor of some
more needy applicant, with a less complex heart-line and a slight
acquaintance with international law, he had, after a summer at
Newport, returned to Europe and again devoted himself to winning a
fame not altogether political. And now there was nothing left, and he
felt that fate had used him scurrilously. He was twenty-eight, and had
exhausted life. He had nothing left but to yawn through weary years
and wish he had never been born.

He clasped his hands behind his head and looked out on the brilliant
crowd from his chair in the Cafe de la Cascade in the Bois. He was
handsome, this blase young Englishman, with a shapely head, poised
strongly upon a muscular throat. Neither beard nor moustache hid the
strong lines of the face. A high type, in spite of his career, his
face was a good deal more suggestive of passion than of sensuality.
He was tall, slight, and sinewy, and carried himself with the indolent
hauteur of a man of many grandfathers. And indeed, unless, perhaps,
that this plaything, the world, was too small, he had little to
complain of. Although a younger son, he had a large fortune in his own
right, left him by an adoring grandmother who had died shortly before
he had come of age, and with whom he had lived from infancy as adopted
son and heir. This grandmother was the one woman who had ever shone
upon his horizon whose disappearance he regretted; and he w