bore about with him a troubled conscience, for he felt that
he was living to himself alone, whereas, as a man, and still more as
member of a privileged order, he should have been justifying his
existence and his position by some useful effort. At three and twenty
he had succeeded to the title--and to very little else; the family had
long been in decline; a Lord Dymchurch who died in the early part of
the nineteenth century practically completed the ruin of his house by
an attempt to form a Utopia in Canada, and since then a rapid
succession of ineffectual peers, _fruges consumere nati_, had steadily
reduced the dignity of the name. The present lord--Walter Erwin de
Gournay Fallowfield--found himself inheritor of one small farm in the
county of Kent, and of funded capital which produced less than a
thousand a year; his ancestral possessions had passed into other hands,
and, excepting the Kentish farm-house, Lord Dymchurch had not even a
dwelling he could call his own. Two sisters were his surviving kin;
their portions being barely sufficient to keep them alive, he applied
to their use a great part of his own income; unmarried, and little
likely to change their condition, these ladies lived together, very
quietly, at a country house in Somerset, where their brother spent some
months of every year with them. For himself, he had rooms at Highgate
Grove, not unpleasant lodgings in a picturesque old house, where he
kept the books which were indispensable to him, and a few pictures
which he had loved from boyhood. All else that remained from the slow
Dymchurch wreck was down in Somerset.

He saw himself as one of the most useless of mortals. For his sisters'
sake he would have been glad to make money, and one way of doing so was
always open to him; he had but to lend his name to company promoters,
who again and again had sought him out with tempting proposals. This,
however, Lord Dymchurch disdained; he was fastidious in matters of
honour, as on some points of taste. For the same reason he remained
unmarried; a penniless peer in the attitude of wooing seemed to him
ridiculous, and in much danger of becoming contemptible. Loving the
life of the country, studious, reserved, he would have liked best of
all to withdraw into some rustic hermitage, and leave the world aside
but this he looked upon as a temptation to be resisted; there must be
duties for him to discharge, if only he could discover them. So he kept
up his old acquain