who give their wits to get their dinners--social
rockets, you know--who will always fire themselves off to sparkle
instead of you, if you give them a white ball at the clubs, or get them
a card for good houses. It saves you so much trouble; it is such a bore
to have to talk."

He went that night, as he had said, to half a dozen good houses,
midnight receptions, and after-midnight waltzes; making his bow in
a Cabinet Minister's vestibule, and taking up the thread of the same
flirtation at three different balls; showing himself for a moment at
a Premier's At-home, and looking eminently graceful and pre-eminently
weary in an ambassadress' drawing room, and winding up the series by a
dainty little supper in the gray of the morning, with a sparkling party
of French actresses, as bright as the bubbles of their own Clicquot.

When he went upstairs to his own bedroom, in Piccadilly, about five
o'clock, therefore, he was both sleepy and tired, and lamented to that
cherished and ever-discreet confidant, a cheroot, the brutal demands of
the Service; which would drag him off, in five hours' time, without
the slightest regard to his feelings, to take share in the hot, heavy,
dusty, searching work of a field-day up at the Scrubs.

"Here--get me to perch as quick as you can, Rake," he murmured, dropping
into an armchair; astonished that Rake did not answer, he saw standing
by him instead the boy Berkeley. Surprise was a weakness of raw
inexperience that Cecil never felt; his gazette as Commander-in-Chief,
or the presence of the Wandering Jew in his lodgings would never have
excited it in him. In the first place, he would have merely lifted his
eyebrows and said, "Be a fearful bore!" in the second he would have done
the same, and murmured, "Queer old cad!"

Surprised, therefore, he was not, at the boy's untimely apparition; but
his eyes dwelt on him with a mild wonder, while his lips dropped but one
word:

"Amber-Amulet?"

Amber-Amulet was a colt of the most marvelous promise at the Royallieu
establishment, looked on to win the next Clearwell, Guineas, and Derby
as a certainty. An accident to the young chestnut was the only thing
that suggested itself as of possibly sufficient importance to make his
brother wait for him at five o'clock on a June morning.

Berkeley looked up confusedly, impatiently:

"You are never thinking but of horses or women," he said peevishly;
"there may be others things in the world, surely."

"Indisp