, satisfied
with the duties they found there, careful in the alliances they
contracted, and equally careful in the bringing up and establishment of
their children. One and all they had been zealous cultivators of the
fine arts. Earlescourt was almost overcrowded with pictures, statues,
and works of art.

Son succeeded father, inheriting with title and estate the same kindly,
simple dispositions and the same tastes, until Rupert Earle, nineteenth
baron, with whom our story opens, became Lord Earle. Simplicity and
kindness were not his characteristics. He was proud, ambitious, and
inflexible; he longed for the time when the Earles should become
famous, when their name should be one of weight in council. In early
life his ambitious desires seemed about to be realized. He was but
twenty when he succeeded his father, and was an only child, clever,
keen and ambitious. In his twenty-first year he married Lady Helena
Brooklyn, the daughter of one of the proudest peers in Britain. There
lay before him a fair and useful life. His wife was an elegant,
accomplished woman, who knew the world and its ways--who had, from her
earliest childhood, been accustomed to the highest and best society.
Lord Earle often told her, laughingly, that she would have made an
excellent embassadress--her manners were so bland and gracious; she had
the rare gift of appearing interested in every one and in everything.

With such a wife at the head of his establishment, Lord Earle hoped for
great things. He looked to a prosperous career as a statesman; no
honors seemed to him too high, no ambition too great. But a hard fate
lay before him. He made one brilliant and successful speech in
Parliament--a speech never forgotten by those who heard it, for its
astonishing eloquence, its keen wit, its bitter satire. Never again
did his voice rouse alike friend and foe. He was seized with a sudden
and dangerous illness which brought him to the brink of the grave.
After a long and desperate struggle with the "grim enemy," he slowly
recovered, but all hope of public life was over for him. The doctors
said he might live to be a hale old man if he took proper precautions;
he must live quietly, avoid all excitement, and never dream again of
politics.

To Lord Earle this seemed like a sentence of exile or death. His wife
tried her utmost to comfort and console him, but for some years he
lived only to repine at his lot. Lady Helena devoted herself to hi