The Commission was headed by a remarkable man, and was able to do valuable work at a moment of great public interest, under the eyes of Europe.  Its members came back covered with distinction, and were much feted through the London season.  Old Mr. Boyce came up from Mellor to see Dick’s success for himself, and his rubicund country gentleman’s face and white head might have been observed at many a London party beside the small Italianate physique of his son.

And love, as he is wont, came in the wake of fortune.  A certain fresh west-country girl, Miss Evelyn Merritt, who had shown her stately beauty at one of the earliest drawing-rooms of the season, fell across Mr. Richard Boyce at this moment when he was most at ease with the world, and the world was giving him every opportunity.  She was very young, as unspoilt as the daffodils of her Somersetshire valleys, and her character—­a character of much complexity and stoical strength—­was little more known to herself than it was to others.  She saw Dick Boyce through a mist of romance; forgot herself absolutely in idealising him, and could have thanked him on her knees when he asked her to marry him.

Five years of Parliament and marriage followed, and then—­a crash.  It was a common and sordid story, made tragic by the quality of the wife, and the disappointment of the father, if not by the ruined possibilities of Dick Boyce himself.  First, the desire to maintain a “position,” to make play in society with a pretty wife, and, in the City, with a marketable reputation; then company-promoting of a more and more doubtful kind; and, finally, a swindle more energetic and less skilful than the rest, which bomb-like went to pieces in the face of the public, filling the air with noise, lamentations, and unsavoury odours.  Nor was this all.  A man has many warnings of ruin, and when things were going badly in the stock market, Richard Boyce, who on his return from the East had been elected by acclamation a member of several fashionable clubs, tried to retrieve himself at the gaming-table.  Lastly, when money matters at home and abroad, when the anxieties of his wife and the altered manners of his acquaintance in and out of the House of Commons grew more than usually disagreeable, a certain little chorus girl came upon the scene and served to make both money and repentance scarcer even than they were before.  No story could be more commonplace or more detestable.

“Ah, how well I remember that poor old fellow—­old John Boyce,” said Lord Maxwell, slowly, shaking his stately white head over it, as he leant talking and musing against the mantelpiece.  “I saw him the day he came back from the attempt to hush up the company business.  I met him in the road, and could not help pulling up to speak to him.  I was so sorry for him.  We had been friends for many years, he and I.  ‘Oh, good God!’ he said, when he saw me.  ‘Don’t stop me—­don’t speak to me!’ And he lashed his horse up—­as white as a sheet—­fat,