any rate on the political platform. He spoke
with facility, and grappled with the drudgery of committees during his
first two years at Westminster in a way to win him the favourable
attention of the Tory whips. He had a gift for modern languages, and
spoke chiefly on foreign affairs, so that when an important Eastern
Commission had to be appointed, in connection with some troubles in the
Balkan States, his merits and his father's exertions with certain old
family friends sufficed to place him upon it.

The Commission was headed by a remarkable man, and was able to do
valuable work at a moment of great public interest, under the eyes of
Europe. Its members came back covered with distinction, and were much
feted through the London season. Old Mr. Boyce came up from Mellor to
see Dick's success for himself, and his rubicund country gentleman's
face and white head might have been observed at many a London party
beside the small Italianate physique of his son.

And love, as he is wont, came in the wake of fortune. A certain fresh
west-country girl, Miss Evelyn Merritt, who had shown her stately beauty
at one of the earliest drawing-rooms of the season, fell across Mr.
Richard Boyce at this moment when he was most at ease with the world,
and the world was giving him every opportunity. She was very young, as
unspoilt as the daffodils of her Somersetshire valleys, and her
character--a character of much complexity and stoical strength--was
little more known to herself than it was to others. She saw Dick Boyce
through a mist of romance; forgot herself absolutely in idealising him,
and could have thanked him on her knees when he asked her to marry him.

Five years of Parliament and marriage followed, and then--a crash. It
was a common and sordid story, made tragic by the quality of the wife,
and the disappointment of the father, if not by the ruined possibilities
of Dick Boyce himself. First, the desire to maintain a "position," to
make play in society with a pretty wife, and, in the City, with a
marketable reputation; then company-promoting of a more and more
doubtful kind; and, finally, a swindle more energetic and less skilful
than the rest, which bomb-like went to pieces in the face of the public,
filling the air with noise, lamentations, and unsavoury odours. Nor was
this all. A man has many warnings of ruin, and when things were going
badly in the stock market, Richard Boyce, who on his return from the
East had been electe