respectability of a dressing-gown and
slippers, with an evening paper on his knee, a slim smoke-coloured
bottle at his elbow, and the mildest of cigars between his lips, when
the traveller, weary and weather-stained, entered the lodging-house
drawing-room.

Captain Paget received his friend very graciously, only murmuring some
faint deprecation of the young man's reeking overcoat, with just such a
look of gentlemanly alarm as the lamented Brummel may have felt when
ushered into the presence of a "damp stranger."

"And so you've come back at last," said the Captain, "from Dorking?" He
made a little pause here, and looked at his friend with a malicious
sparkle in his eye. "And how was the old aunt? Likely to cut up for any
considerable amount, eh? It could only be with a view to that
cutting-up process that you could consent to isolate yourself in such a
place as Dorking. How did you find things?" "O, I don't know, I'm
sure," Mr. Hawkehurst answered rather impatiently, for his worst
suspicions were confirmed by his patron's manner; "I only know I found
it tiresome work enough."

"Ah, to be sure! elderly people always are tiresome, especially when
they are unacquainted with the world. There is a perennial youth about
men and women of the world. The sentimental twaddle people talk of the
freshness and purity of a mind unsullied by communion with the world is
the shallowest nonsense. Your Madame du Deffand at eighty and your
Horace Walpole at sixty are as lively as a girl and boy. Your
octogenarian Voltaire is the most agreeable creature in existence. But
take Cymon and Daphne from their flocks and herds and pastoral valleys
in their old age, and see what senile bores and quavering imbeciles you
would find them. Yes, I have no doubt you found your Dorking aunt a
nuisance. Take off your wet overcoat and put it out of the room, and
then ring for more hot water. You'll find that cognac very fine. Won't
you have a cigar?"

The Captain extended his russia-leather case with the blandest smile.
It was a very handsome case. Captain Paget was a man who could descend
into some unknown depths of the social ocean in the last stage of
shabbiness, and who, while his acquaintance were congratulating
themselves upon the fact of his permanent disappearance, would start up
suddenly in an unexpected place, provided with every necessity and
luxury of civilized life, from a wardrobe by Poole to the last
fashionable absurdity in the shape of