hy little man, _gauche_, and--and--underbred,
even for his late position."

"That's a pity. I should like to see him," added the grey little
nobleman. "I suppose you will act for him as you did for poor young
Edward?"

Poor young Edward was the deceased minor whose early death had wrecked
the finest chances the Windgall family craft had ever carried.

"I suppose so," said Begg.

"I presume," said the earl, "that even if he wanted to call in his money
you could arrange elsewhere?"

"With regard to the first mortgage?" asked Mr. Begg. "Certainly."

"And what about the new arrangement?" asked the earl nervously.

"Impossible, I regret to say."

"Very well," returned the earl, with a sigh. "I suppose the timber must
go. If poor Edward had lived, it would all have been very different."

Next day, when Kimberley, preposterously overdressed and thoroughly
ashamed of himself, was trying to talk business in Mr. Begg's office,
the Earl of Windgall was announced. There was nothing in the world that
could have terrified him more. And when the father of his ideal love,
Lady Ella Santerre, shook him by the hand, he could only gasp and gurgle
in response. But the earl's manner gradually reassured him, and in a
little time he began to plume himself in harmless trembling vanity upon
sitting in the same room with a nobleman and a great lawyer.

"I am pleased to have met Mr. Kimberley," said the earl, in going; "and
I trust we shall see more of each other."

Mr. Kimberley flushed, and bowed in a violent flutter.

As the earl was driven homeward he could not help feeling that he was
engaged in a shameful enterprise. People would talk if he invited this
gilded little snob to Shouldershott Castle, and would know very well why
he was asked there. Let them talk.

"A million and a quarter!" said the poor peer. "And if I don't catch
him, somebody else will."

Meanwhile, Captain Jack Clare, an extremely popular young officer of
dragoons, was in the depths of despair. He was the younger brother of
Lord Montacute, whose family was poor; he loved Lady Ella Santerre,
whose family was still poorer. The heads of the families had forbidden
the match for financial reasons. He had stolen an interview with Ella,
and had found that she bowed to the decision of the seniors.

"It is all quite hopeless and impossible," she had said. "Good-bye,
Jack!"

As he rode dispiritedly away, he could not see, for the intervening
trees, that she was kn