ermore. He had the
satisfaction of being handsomely welcomed by them, and was plunged under
their guidance into the gaieties that the town afforded liberally for
people of quality.

Mr. Caryll was--as I hope you have gathered--an agreeable fellow, very
free, moreover, with the contents of his well-equipped purse; and so
you may conceive that the town showed him a very friendly, cordial
countenance. He fell into the habits of the men whose company he
frequented; his days were as idle as theirs, and spent at the parade,
the Ring, the play, the coffeehouse and the ordinary.

But under the gay exterior he affected he carried a spirit of most vile
unrest. The anger which had prompted his impulse to execute, after all,
the business on which he was come, and to deliver his father the letter
that was to work his ruin, was all spent. He had cooled, and cool it
was idle for him to tell himself that Lord Ostermore, by his heartless
allusion to the crime of his early years, had proved himself worthy of
nothing but the pit Mr. Caryll had been sent to dig for him. There were
moments when he sought to compel himself so to think, to steel himself
against all other considerations. But it was idle. The reflection that
the task before him was unnatural came ever to revolt him. To gain ease,
the most that he could do--and he had the faculty of it developed in
a preternatural degree--was to put the business from him for the time,
endeavor to forget it. And he had another matter to consider and to
plague him--the matter of Hortensia Winthrop. He thought of her a great
deal more than was good for his peace of mind, for all that he pretended
to a gladness that things were as they were. Each morning that he
lounged at the parade in St. James's Park, each evening that he visited
the Ring, it was in the hope of catching some glimpse of her among the
fashionable women that went abroad to see and to be seen. And on the
third morning after his arrival the thing he hoped for came to pass.

It had happened that my lady had ordered her carriage that morning,
dressed herself with the habitual splendor, which but set off the
shortcomings of her lean and angular person, egregiously coiffed,
pulvilled and topknotted, and she had sent a message amounting to a
command to Mistress Winthrop that she should drive in the park with her.

Poor Hortensia, whose one desire was to hide her face from the town's
uncharitable sight just then, fearing, indeed, that Ru