as, perhaps, like Lord Castlereagh's unstarred
coat, plus distingue, but certainly more modest. The milor, if not
associated with boundless wealth, six carriages, two couriers, three
cooks, and a groom of the chambers, the whole of the "Russie," or
the "Black Eagle," means nothing abroad. If not bound up with all the
extravagance and all the eccentricities of riches, if not dazzling by
display or amazing by oddity, it is a contradiction of terms; and to
be an English noble without waste, profusion, and absurdity, is to deny
your country or be a counterfeit of your class.

Lord Norwood knew and felt all these things. They had often occupied his
speculations and engaged his thoughts; so that, if his mind reverted to
them now, it was to regard them as facts for future theory to build upon
as mathematicians make use of the proofs of geometry without going over
the steps which lead to conviction. No; all his present reflections took
a practical form, and might be summed up in the one resolve, "I must go
no further. I have done everything that a man dare do,--perhaps a little
more, and yet keep his footing in the world." That tacit verdict of "not
proven," which had been passed upon so many of his actions, might at
any moment be reversed now, and a review of his life's career presented
anything but a bright retrospect. Expulsion from a great school at
thirteen; three years' private dissipation and secret wickedness in a
clergyman's family; a dissolute regiment, from which he was given
leave to sell out at Malta; two years with the Legion or Don Carlos,
it mattered not which, in Spain; a year or so in London, with a weak
attempt at reformation; a staff appointment in India obtained and
sold; exposure partly hushed up; debts; Jews; renewals; the Fleet; the
Bankruptcy Court; a few disreputable duels; an action for seduction;
ending with the last affair at Newmarket, made up the grand outline,
the details comprising various little episodes with which we must not
trouble ourselves.

One incident, however, would come up prominently before his Lordship's
mind, and, however little given to let the past usurp the thoughts
which should be given to the present, it still insisted upon sharing his
attention. This was no less than a little love affair in Spain with a
"ballerina" of the Opera, with whom, by the aid of a young priest then
studying at Saragossa, he had contracted a mock marriage. The sudden
movement of a corps of the army to