“I don’t think that is fair, sir,” said Norris.  “I lived at college exactly as you told me.  I am sorry I was sent down, and you have a perfect right to blame me for that; but you have no right to pitch into me about these debts.”

The effect upon a stupid man not unjustly incensed need scarcely be described.  For a while Singleton raved.

“I’ll tell you what, father,” said Norris at last, “I don’t think this is going to do.  I think you had better let me take to painting.  It’s the only thing I take a spark of interest in.  I shall never be steady as long as I’m at anything else.”

“When you stand here, sir, to the neck in disgrace,” said the father, “I should have hoped you would have had more good taste than to repeat this levity.”

The hint was taken; the levity was never more obtruded on the father’s notice, and Norris was inexorably launched upon a backward voyage.  He went abroad to study foreign languages, which he learned, at a very expensive rate; and a fresh crop of debts fell soon to be paid, with similar lamentations, which were in this case perfectly justified, and to which Norris paid no regard.  He had been unfairly treated over the Oxford affair; and with a spice of malice very surprising in one so placable, and an obstinacy remarkable in one so weak, refused from that day forward to exercise the least captaincy on his expenses.  He wasted what he would; he allowed his servants to despoil him at their pleasure; he sowed insolvency; and when the crop was ripe, notified his father with exasperating calm.  His own capital was put in his hands, he was planted in the diplomatic service and told he must depend upon himself.

He did so till he was twenty-five; by which time he had spent his money, laid in a handsome choice of debts, and acquired (like so many other melancholic and uninterested persons) a habit of gambling.  An Austrian colonel—­the same who afterwards hanged himself at Monte Carlo—­gave him a lesson which lasted two-and-twenty hours, and left him wrecked and helpless.  Old Singleton once more repurchased the honour of his name, this time at a fancy figure; and Norris was set afloat again on stern conditions.  An allowance of three hundred pounds in the year was to be paid to him quarterly by a lawyer in Sydney, New South Wales.  He was not to write.  Should he fail on any quarter-day to be in Sydney, he was to be held for dead, and the allowance tacitly withdrawn.  Should he return to Europe, an advertisement publicly disowning him was to appear in every paper of repute.

It was one of his most annoying features as a son, that he was always polite, always just, and in whatever whirlwind of domestic anger, always calm.  He expected trouble; when trouble came, he was unmoved:  he might have said with Singleton, “I told you so”; he was content with thinking, “just as I expected.”  On the fall of these last thunderbolts, he bore himself like a person only distantly