for
anything. In the evening we would dine together, or go to a theatre, or
sit in my chambers and play cards before resuming the wrangle--we used
to take an hour of Vingt-un, by way of relaxation. And always during
that period, whatever we did, wherever we went, Dick Mortiboy sat
between us. Dear old Dick grew quiet towards the end. The wrangling was
finished. The inevitable was before him; he must pay for the past. Love
could not be his, nor honour, such as comes to most men, nor the quiet
_vie de famille_, which is all that life really has to give worth
having. His cousin Frank might have love and honour. For him--Dick's
brave eyes looked straight before--he had no illusions; for him, the end
that belongs to the nineteenth-century ruffler, the man of the West, the
sportsman and the gambler, the only end--the bullet from the revolver of
his accomplice, was certain and inevitable. So it ended. Dick died. The
novel was finished.

Dick died; our friend died; he had his faults--but he was Dick; and he
died. And alas! his history was all told and done with; the manuscript
finished; the last wrangle over; the fatal word, the melancholy word,
_Finis_, written below the last line.

'_THE FAMILY SCAPEGRACE_'

BY JAMES PAYN

[Illustration]

I had written a great many short stories and articles in all sorts of
publications, from _Eliza Cook's Journal_ to the _Westminster Review_,
before I ventured upon writing a novel; and the appearance of them I
have since had cause to regret. Not at all because they were 'immature,'
and still less because I am ashamed of them--on the contrary, I still
think them rather good--but because the majority of them were not made
the most of from a literary point of view, and also went very cheap. As
a friend observed to me, who was much my senior, and whose advice was
therefore treated with contempt, 'You are like an extravagant cook, who
wastes too much material on a single dish.' The _entrees_ of the
story-teller--his early and tentative essays in Fiction--if he has
really any turn for his calling, are generally open to this criticism.
Later on, he becomes more economical (sometimes, indeed, a good deal too
much so, because, alas! there is so little in the cupboard), and has a
much finer sense of proportion.

I don't know how many years I went on writing narratives of school and
college life, and spinning short stories, like a literary spider, out of
my own interior, but I don't re