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He ceased flicking the rose-bush, and knitted his brows. He seemed to be recalling it to his imagination.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “I’m afraid it would shock her. It’s my fault, I know,” he added, remorsefully. “I ought to have told you.”

Then an idea came to him.

“I suppose,” he said, “you wouldn’t care to pretend you were ill, and stop in bed just for the day?”

I explained that my conscience would not permit my being a party to such deception

“No, I thought you wouldn’t,” he replied. “I must explain it to her. I think I’ll say you’ve lost your bag. I shouldn’t like her to think bad of us.”

Later on a fourteenth cousin died, leaving him a large fortune. He purchased an estate in Yorkshire, and became a “county family,” and then his real troubles began.

From May to the middle of August, save for a little fly fishing, which generally resulted in his getting his feet wet and catching a cold, life was fairly peaceful; but from early autumn to late spring he found the work decidedly trying. He was a stout man, constitutionally nervous of fire-arms, and a six-hours’ tramp with a heavy gun across ploughed fields, in company with a crowd of careless persons who kept blazing away within an inch of other people’s noses, harassed and exhausted him. He had to get out of bed at four on chilly October mornings to go cub-hunting, and twice a week throughout the winter–except when a blessed frost brought him a brief respite–he had to ride to hounds. That he usually got off with nothing more serious than mere bruises and slight concussions of the spine, he probably owed to the fortunate circumstances of his being little and fat. At stiff timber he shut his eyes and rode hard; and ten yards from a river he would begin to think about bridges.

Yet he never complained.

“If you are a country gentleman,” he would say, “you must behave as a country gentleman, and take the rough with the smooth.”

As ill fate would have it a chance speculation doubled his fortune, and it became necessary that he should go into Parliament and start a yacht. Parliament made his head ache, and the yacht made him sick. Notwithstanding, every summer he would fill it with a lot of expensive people who bored him, and sail away for a month’s misery in the Mediterranean.

During one cruise his guests built up a highly-interesting gambling scandal. He himself was confined to his cabin at the time, and knew nothing about it; but the Opposition papers, getting hold of the story, referred casually to the yacht as a “floating hell,” and The Police News awarded his portrait the place of honour as the chief criminal of the week.

Later on he got into a cultured set, ruled by a thick-lipped undergraduate. His favourite literature had hitherto been of the Corelli and Tit-Bits order, but now he read Meredith and the yellow book, and tried to understand them; and instead of the Gaiety, he subscribed to the Independent Theatre, and fed “his soul,” on Dutch Shakespeares. What he liked in art was a pretty girl by a cottage-door with an eligible young man in the background, or a child and a dog doing something funny. They told him these things were wrong and made him buy “Impressions” that stirred his liver to its deepest depths every time he looked at them–green cows on red hills by pink moonlight, or scarlet-haired corpses with three feet of neck.

He said meekly that such seemed to him unnatural, but they answered that nature had nothing to do with the question; that the artist saw things like that, and that whatever an artist saw–no matter in what condition he may have been when he saw it–that was art.

They took him to Wagner festivals and Burne-Jones’s private views. They read him all the minor poets. They booked seats for him at all Ibsen’s plays. They introduced him into all the most soulful circles of artistic society. His days were one long feast of other people’s enjoyments.

One morning I met him coming down the steps of the Arts Club. He looked weary. He was just off to a private view at the New Gallery. In the afternoon he had to attend an amateur performance of “The Cenci,” given by the Shelley Society. Then followed three literary and artistic At Homes, a dinner with an Indian nabob who couldn’t speak a word of English, “Tristam and Isolde” at Covent Garden Theatre, and a ball at Lord Salisbury’s to wind up the day.

I laid my hand upon his shoulder.

“Come with me to Epping Forest,” I said. “There’s a four-horse brake starts from Charing Cross at eleven. It’s Saturday, and there’s bound to be a crowd down there. I’ll play you a game of skittles, and we will have a shy at the cocoa-nuts. You used to be rather smart at cocoa-nuts. We can have lunch there and be back at seven, dine at the Troc., spend the evening at the Empire, and sup at the Savoy. What do you say?”

He stood hesitating on the steps, a wistful look in his eyes.

His brougham drew up against the curb, and he started as if from a dream.

“My dear fellow,” he replied, “what would people say?” And shaking me by the hand, he took his seat, and the footman slammed the door upon him.