House of Commons, and refused to accept it.  The Ministry declined to take No for an answer.  They whispered confidentially, “Will you take it with a peerage?” Mr. Delamayn consulted his wife, and took it with a peerage.  The London Gazette announced him to the world as Baron Holchester of Holchester.  And the friends of the family rubbed their hands and said, “What did we tell you?  Here are our two young friends, Julius and Geoffrey, the sons of a lord!”

And where was Mr. Vanborough all this time?  Exactly where we left him five years since.

He was as rich, or richer, than ever.  He was as well-connected as ever.  He was as ambitious as ever.  But there it ended.  He stood still in the House; he stood still in society; nobody liked him; he made no friends.  It was all the old story over again, with this difference, that the soured man was sourer; the gray head, grayer; and the irritable temper more unendurable than ever.  His wife had her rooms in the house and he had his, and the confidential servants took care that they never met on the stairs.  They had no children.  They only saw each other at their grand dinners and balls.  People ate at their table, and danced on their floor, and compared notes afterward, and said how dull it was.  Step by step the man who had once been Mr. Vanborough’s lawyer rose, till the peerage received him, and he could rise no longer; while Mr. Vanborough, on the lower round of the ladder, looked up, and noted it, with no more chance (rich as he was and well-connected as he was) of climbing to the House of Lords than your chance or mine.

The man’s career was ended; and on the day when the nomination of the new peer was announced, the man ended with it.

He laid the newspaper aside without making any remark, and went out.  His carriage set him down, where the green fields still remain, on the northwest of London, near the foot-path which leads to Hampstead.  He walked alone to the villa where he had once lived with the woman whom he had so cruelly wronged.  New houses had risen round it, part of the old garden had been sold and built on.  After a moment’s hesitation he went to the gate and rang the bell.  He gave the servant his card.  The servant’s master knew the name as the name of a man of great wealth, and of a Member of Parliament.  He asked politely to what fortunate circumstance he owed the honor of that visit.  Mr. Vanborough answered, briefly and simply, “I once lived here; I have associations with the place with which it is not necessary for me to trouble you.  Will you excuse what must seem to you a very strange request?  I should like to see the dining-room again, if there is no objection, and if I am disturbing nobody.”

The “strange requests” of rich men are of the nature of “privileged communications,” for this excellent reason, that they are sure not to be requests for money.  Mr. Vanborough was shown into the dining-room.  The master of the house, secretly wondering, watched him.