e. I have promised Clara to pull you through this wretched mess; and
I'll do it. Get a chair, and give me a light. I'm going to sit on your
bed, smoke a cigar, and have a long talk with you."

While he was lighting his cigar, I looked more closely at him than
before. Though he was the same as ever in manner; though his expression
still preserved its reckless levity of former days, I now detected that
he had changed a little in some other respects. His features had become
coarser--dissipation had begun to mark them. His spare, active, muscular
figure had filled out; he was dressed rather carelessly; and of all
his trinkets and chains of early times, not one appeared about him now.
Ralph looked prematurely middle-aged, since I had seen him last.

"Well," he began, "first of all, about my coming back. The fact is, the
morganatic Mrs. Ralph--" (he referred to his last mistress) "wanted to
see England, and I was tired of being abroad. So I brought her back
with me; and we're going to live quietly, somewhere in the Brompton
neighbourhood. That woman has been my salvation--you must come and see
her. She has broke me of gaming altogether; I was going to the devil
as fast as I could, when she stopped me--but you know all about it, of
course. Well: we got to London yesterday afternoon; and in the evening
I left her at the hotel, and went to report myself at home. There, the
first thing I heard, was that you had cut me out of my old original
distinction of being the family scamp. Don't look distressed, Basil; I'm
not laughing at you; I've come to do something better than that. Never
mind my talk: nothing in the world ever was serious to _me,_ and nothing
ever will be."

He stopped to knock the ash off his cigar, and settle himself more
comfortably on my bed; then proceeded.

"It has been my ill-luck to see my father pretty seriously offended on
more than one occasion; but I never saw him so very quiet and so very
dangerous as last night when he was telling me about you. I remember
well enough how he spoke and looked, when he caught me putting away
my trout-flies in the pages of that family history of his; but it was
nothing to see him or hear him then, to what it is now. I can tell you
this, Basil--if I believed in what the poetical people call a broken
heart (which I don't), I should be almost afraid that _he_ was
broken-hearted. I saw it was no use to say a word for you just yet, so
I sat quiet and listened to him till I got