‘It is a reward which is unfortunately too often obtained by me,’ replied Mr. Pole.  ’One of the most annoying consequences of your friend’s popularity, Lady Monteagle, is that there is not a dinner party where one can escape him.  I met him yesterday at Fanshawe’s.  He amused himself by eating only biscuits, and calling for soda water, while we quaffed our Burgundy.  How very original!  What a thing it is to be a great poet!’

‘Perverse, provoking mortal!’ exclaimed Lady Monteagle.  ’And on what should a poet live?  On coarse food, like you coarse mortals?  Cadurcis is all spirit, and in my opinion his diet only makes him more interesting.’

‘I understand,’ said Mr. Pole, ’that he cannot endure a woman to eat at all.  But you are all spirit, Lady Monteagle, and therefore of course are not in the least inconvenienced.  By-the-bye, do you mean to give us any of those charming little suppers this season?’

‘I shall not invite you,’ replied her ladyship; ’none but admirers of Lord Cadurcis enter this house.’

‘Your menace effects my instant conversion,’ replied Mr. Pole.  ’I will admire him as much as you desire, only do not insist upon my reading his works.’

‘I have not the slightest doubt you know them by heart,’ rejoined her ladyship.

Mr. Pole smiled, bowed, and disappeared; and Lady Monteagle sat down to write a billet to Lord Cadurcis, to entreat him to be with her at five o’clock, which was at least half an hour before the other guests were expected.  The Monteagles were considered to dine ridiculously late.

CHAPTER II.

Marmion Herbert, sprung from one of the most illustrious families in England, became at an early age the inheritor of a great estate, to which, however, he did not succeed with the prejudices or opinions usually imbibed or professed by the class to which he belonged.  While yet a boy, Marmion Herbert afforded many indications of possessing a mind alike visionary and inquisitive, and both, although not in an equal degree, sceptical and creative.  Nature had gifted him with precocious talents; and with a temperament essentially poetic, he was nevertheless a great student.  His early reading, originally by accident and afterwards by an irresistible inclination, had fallen among the works of the English freethinkers:  with all their errors, a profound and vigorous race, and much superior to the French philosophers, who were after all only their pupils and their imitators.  While his juvenile studies, and in some degree the predisposition of his mind, had thus prepared him to doubt and finally to challenge the propriety of all that was established and received, the poetical and stronger bias of his mind enabled him quickly to supply the place of everything he would remove and destroy; and, far from being the victim of those frigid and indifferent feelings which must ever be the portion of the mere doubter, Herbert,