g at the door. "A note for you, sir, from Colonel
Morley,--just come." Lionel hastily opened it, and read,

MY DEAR HAUGHTON,--Mr. Darrell has suddenly arrived in London. Keep
yourself free all to-morrow, when, no doubt, he will see you. I am
hurrying off to him.

Yours in haste, A. V. M.

CHAPTER III.

Once more Guy Darrell.

Guy Darrell was alone: a lofty room in a large house on the first
floor,--his own house in Carlton Gardens, which he had occupied
during his brief and brilliant parliamentary career; since then, left
contemptuously to the care of a house agent, to be let by year or by
season, it had known various tenants of an opulence and station suitable
to its space and site. Dinners and concerts, routs and balls, had
assembled the friends and jaded the spirits of many a gracious host
and smiling hostess. The tenure of one of these temporary occupants had
recently expired; and, ere the agent had found another, the long absent
owner dropped down into its silenced halls as from the clouds, without
other establishment than his old servant Mills and the woman in charge
of the house. There, as in a caravansery, the traveller took his rest,
stately and desolate. Nothing so comfortless as one of those large
London houses all to one's self. In long rows against the walls stood
the empty fauteuils. Spectral from the gilded ceiling hung lightless
chandeliers.--The furniture, pompous, but worn by use and faded by time,
seemed mementos of departed revels. When you return to your house in
the country--no matter how long the absence, no matter how decayed by
neglect the friendly chambers may be, if it has only been deserted
in the meanwhile (not let to new races, who, by their own shifting
dynasties, have supplanted the rightful lord, and half-effaced his
memorials)--the walls may still greet you forgivingly, the character of
Home be still there. You take up again the thread of associations which
had, been suspended, not snapped. But it is otherwise with a house in
cities, especially in our fast-living London, where few houses descend
from father to son,--where the title-deeds are rarely more than those of
a purchased lease for a term of years, after which your property quits
you. A house in London, which your father never entered, in which no
elbow-chair, no old-fashioned work-table, recall to you the kind smile
of a mother; a house that you have left as you leave an inn, let to
people whose names