ch engaged to be able to
receive me again; and as to that little matter I had mentioned, he had
an arrangement to propose which might be satisfactory. And whether
it was that my faculties were not the clearer for my previous night's
convivialities, or that Temple's explanations were of the most muddled
description, or that the noble lord had purposely given him a tangled
skein to unravel, I don't know; but all I could make out of the proposed
arrangement was that he would n't give any money back,--no, not on any
terms: to do so would be something so derogatory to himself, to his
rank, to his position in diplomacy, it would amount to a self-accusation
of fraud; what would be thought of him by his brother peers, by society,
by the world, and by The Office?

"He had, however, the alternate presentation to the living of Oxington
in Herts. It was two hundred and forty pounds per annum and a house,--in
fact, 'a provision more than ample,' he said, 'for any man not utterly
a worldling.' He was not sure whether the next appointment lay with
himself or a certain Sir Marcus Cluff,--a retired fishmonger, he
thought,--then living at Rome; but as well as I could make out, if
it was Lord Culduff's turn he would appoint L'Estrange, and if it was
Cluff's we were to cajole, or to bully, or to persuade him out of it;
and L'Estrange was to be inducted as soon as the present incumbent, who
only wanted a few months of ninety, was promoted to a better place. This
may all seem very confused, dim, and unintelligible, but it is a plain
ungarbled statement in comparison with what I received from Temple,
who, to do him justice, felt all the awkwardness of being sent out to
do something he did n't understand by means that he never possessed. He
handed me, however, a letter for Cluff from the noble Viscount, which I
was to deliver at once; and, in fact, this much was intelligible, that
the sooner I took myself away from Naples, in any direction I liked
best, the better. There are times when it is as well not to show that
you see the enemy is cheating you, when the shrewdest policy is to let
him deem you a dupe and wait patiently till he has compromised himself
beyond recall. In this sense I agreed to be the bearer of the letter,
and started the same night for Rome.

"Cluff was installed at the same hotel where I was stopping, and I saw
him the next morning. He was a poor broken-down creature, sitting in a
room saturated with some peculiar vapor wh