uption, and surrender his whole soul to his favourite occupation.

At length, after a fortnight's delay and meditation, he wrote shortly to
Saville and his son; saying, after much reproach to the latter, that
if the commission could really be purchased at the sum specified he
was willing to make a sacrifice, for which he must pinch himself, and
conclude the business. This touched the son, but Saville laughed him
out of the twinge of good feeling; and very shortly afterwards, Percy
Godolphin was gazetted as a cornet in the ---- Life-Guards.

The life of a soldier, in peace, is indolent enough, Heaven knows! Percy
liked the new uniforms and the new horses--all of which were bought on
credit. He liked his new companions; he liked balls; he liked flirting;
he did not dislike Hyde Park from four o'clock till six; and he was not
very much bored by drills and parade. It was much to his credit in the
world that he was the protege of a man who had so great a character for
profligacy and gambling as Augustus Saville; and under such auspices he
found himself launched at once into the full tide of "good society."

Young, romantic, high-spirited--with the classic features of an
Antinous, and a very pretty knack of complimenting and writing
verses--Percy Godolphin soon became, while yet more fit in years for
the nursery than the world, "the curled darling" of that wide class of
high-born women who have nothing to do but to hear love made to them,
and who, all artifice themselves, think the love sweetest which springs
from the most natural source. They like boyhood when it is not bashful;
and from sixteen to twenty, a Juan need scarcely go to Seville to find a
Julia.

But love was not the worst danger that menaced the intoxicated boy.
Saville, the most seductive of tutors--Saville who, in his wit; his
bon ton, his control over the great world, seemed as a god to all less
elevated and less aspiring,--Saville was Godolphin's constant companion;
and Saville was worse than a profligate--he was a gambler! One would
think that gaming was the last vice that could fascinate the young: its
avarice, its grasping, its hideous selfishness, its cold, calculating
meanness, would, one might imagine, scare away all who have yet other
and softer deities to worship. But, in fact, the fault of youth is that
it can rarely resist whatever is the Mode. Gaming, in all countries, is
the vice of an aristocracy. The young find it already established in the