What are the qualifications of a general favorite?  Good looks, good birth, good-humor, and good assurance will do much; but the want of one or more of these will not invalidate the election, nor the union of all four insure it.  It must be very pleasant to serve in the compagnie d’elite.  They have privileges to which the Line may not aspire.  It does not much matter what they do.  Their victories make them no enemies, and their defeats raise them up hosts of sympathizers and apologists.  When they err gravely, if you hint at the misdemeanor, a “true believer” looks at you indignantly, not to say contemptuously, and says, “What could you expect?  It’s only poor—­” Yes, it is a great gift—­Amiability; and when the possessor dies, it is profoundly true that better men might be better spared.

Very soon Raymond came to take his daughter back to England.  That calm old calculating machine was more deranged and shocked by the catastrophe than I should have thought it possible he would have been by any earthly disaster.  He was getting older now, and more broken, it is true, and so, perhaps, was more accessible to the weakness of sympathy.  At all events, nothing could be kinder and more considerate than his conduct to Isabel.

Guy and I still lingered on in Rome.  He was untiring in his researches, but quite unsuccessful.  Yet it was not that the police were remiss, or the country people inclined to shield the murderer.  The best of them would have sold his own father to the guillotine for half the reward offered by Livingstone, for he lavished as much gold in trying to clear up that crime as in old days the Cenci or Colonna did to smother theirs.  At length we were forced to give it up, and returned home in the Petrel.  I own I despaired of ever being more successful; but my companion evidently had not done so, for I heard him, more than once, mutter to himself, in the same low, determined tone, “If he is on earth, I’ll find him.”

Immediately on our arrival, Guy went up to Bruce’s home in Scotland.  He only learned that the latter had not been there for a long time; but that some months back, Allan Macbane, a sort of steward and old dependent of the family, had left suddenly, summoned, it was supposed, by his master.  More the people could not or would not tell.

At his banker’s it was discovered that, immediately after the Forresters’ marriage, he had drawn out a very large sum—­not in letters of credit, but in bank-notes—­and had not been heard of since.  After much trouble, we did find out that one of the large notes had been changed at Florence about the time of the murder, but the description of the person did not answer in the least to that of Bruce or the man who was supposed to be his attendant.  All trace stopped there.  So the months rolled away.  I constantly saw Guy, and sometimes was with him both in town and at Kerton, where Isabel was staying with Lady Catharine.  He still appeared to have no doubt of the ultimate result of the search, which, personally or by deputy, he never intermitted for a day.