susceptible--as easy of deception--as those about him. Let us
pardon our worthy Colonel if he did not comprehend this; shrewder heads
than his own had made the same mistake. Half to resent this covert
slyness, half to arouse himself to any conflict before him, he said,
in a tone of determination, "It is only fair to tell you that you are
yourself to blame for anything that may have befallen poor Glencore."

"I to blame! Why, my dear Harcourt, you are surely dreaming."

"As wide awake as ever I was. If it had not been for a blunder of
yours,--an unpardonable blunder, seeing what has come of it,--sending
a pack of trash to me about salt and sulphur, while you forwarded a
private letter about Glencore to the Foreign Office, all this might not
have happened."

"I remember that it was a most disagreeable mistake. I have paid heavily
for it, too. That lotion for the cervical vertebrae has come back all
torn, and we cannot make out whether it be a phosphate or a prot'-oxide
of bismuth. You don't happen to remember?"

"I?--of course I know nothing about it. I'd as soon have taken a
porcupine for a pillow as I 'd have adventured on the confounded
mixture. But, as I was saying, that blessed letter, written by some
Princess or other, as I understand, fell into the King's hands, and the
consequence was that he sent off immediately to Glencore an order to go
down to him at Brighton. Naturally enough, I thought he 'd not go; he
had the good and sufficient pretext of his bad health to excuse him.
Nobody had seen him abroad in the world for years back, and it was easy
enough to say that he could not bear the journey. Nothing of the kind;
he received the command as willingly as he might have done an invitation
to dinner fifteen years ago, and talked of nothing else for the whole
evening after but of his old days and nights in Carlton House; how
gracious the Prince used to be to him formerly; how constantly he was a
guest at his table; what a brilliant society it was; how full of wit and
the rest of it; till, by Jove, what between drinking more wine than he
was accustomed to take, and the excitement of his own talking, he became
quite wild and unmanageable. He was not drunk, nor anything like it, it
was rather the state of a man whose mind had got some sudden shock;
for in the midst of perfectly rational conversation, he would fall
into paroxysms of violent passion, inveighing against every one, and
declaring that he never had possess