rtie! nobody would have believed him if he had said so, but he
had been honestly and truly thinking, for some brief time past, whether
it would not be possible and worth while for him to shake himself free
of this life, of which he was growing heartily tired, and make a name
for himself in the world in some other fashion than by winging Russians,
importing new dancers, taking French women to the Bads, scandalizing
society, and beggaring himself. He had begun to wonder whether it was
not yet, after all, too late, and whether if----when down had come the
request from the Horse Guards for him to sell out, and the rush of all
his creditors upon him, and away forever went all his stray shapeless
fancies of a possible better future. And--consolation or aggravation,
whichever it be--he knew that he had no one, save himself, to thank for
it; for no man ever had a more brilliant start in the race of life than
he, and none need have made better running over the course, had he only
kept straight or put on the curb as he went down-hill. Poor Bertie! you
must have known many such lives, or I can't tell where your own has been
spent; lives which began so brilliantly that none could rival them, and
which ended--God help them!--so miserably and so pitifully that you do
not think of them without a shudder still?

Poor Bertie!--a man of a sweeter temper, a more generous nature, a more
lavish kindliness, never lived. He had the most versatile talents and
the gentlest manners in the world; and yet here he was, having fairly
come to ruin, and very nearly to disgrace.

It was little wonder that his father, looking at him and thinking of all
he might have been, and all he might have done, was lashed into a
terrible bitterness of passionate grief, and hurled words at him of a
deadly wrath, in the morning that followed on the Grand Military. Fiery
as his comrades the Napiers, of a stern code as a soldier, and a lofty
honor as a man, haughty in pride and swift to passion, old Sir Lionel
was stung to the quick by his son's fall, and would have sooner, by a
thousand-fold, have followed him to his grave, than have seen him live
to endure that tacit dismissal from the service of the country--the
deepest shame, in his sight, that could have touched his race.

"I knew you were lost to morality, but I did not know till now that you
were lost to honor!" said the old Lion, with such a storm of passion in
him that his words swept out, acrid and unchosen,