ion I had held but yesterday. I thought of the
sponging-house, and my brow was moist. England was no place, in those
days, for fallen gentlemen. With us in the Colonies the law offered
itself. Mr. Swain, and other barristers of Annapolis, came to my mind,
for God had given me courage. I would try the law. For I had small hopes
of defeating my Uncle Grafton.

The Sunday morning dawned brightly, and the church bells ringing brought
me to my feet, and out into Piccadilly, in the forlorn hope that I might
see my lady on her way to morning service,--see her for the last time in
life, perhaps. Her locket I wore over my heart. It had lain upon hers.
To see her was the most exquisite agony in the world. But not to see
her, and to feel that she was scarce quarter of a mile away, was beyond
endurance. I stood beside an area at the entrance to Arlington Street,
and waited for an hour, quite in vain; watching every face that passed,
townsmen in their ill-fitting Sunday clothes, and fine ladies with the
footmen carrying velvet prayerbooks. And some that I knew only stared,
and others gave me distant bows from their coach windows. For those that
fall from fashion are dead to fashion.

Dorothy did not go to church that day.

It is a pleasure, my dears, when writing of that hour of bitterness, to
record the moments of sweetness which lightened it. As I climbed up to
my rooms in Dover Street, I heard merry sounds above, and a cloud of
smoke blew out of the door when I opened it.

"Here he is," cried Mr. Fox. "You see, Richard, we have not deserted you
when we can win no more of your money."

"Why, egad! the man looks as if he had had a calamity," said Mr.
Fitzpatrick.

"And there is not a Jew here," Fox continued. "Tho' it is Sunday,
the air in my Jerusalem chamber is as bad as in any crimps den in
St. Giles's. 'Slife, and I live to be forty, I shall have as many
underground avenues as his Majesty Louis the Eleventh."

"He must have a place," put in my Lord Carlisle.

"We must do something for him," said Fox, "albeit he is an American and
a Whig, and all the rest of the execrations. Thou wilt have to swallow
thy golden opinions, my buckskin, when we put thee in office."

I was too overwhelmed even to protest.

"You are not in such a cursed bad way, when all is said, Richard," said
Fitzpatrick. "Charles, when he loses a fortune, immediately borrows
another."

"If you stick to whist and quinze," said Charles, solemnly, giving