He went that night, as he had said, to half a dozen good houses, midnight receptions, and after-midnight waltzes; making his bow in a Cabinet Minister’s vestibule, and taking up the thread of the same flirtation at three different balls; showing himself for a moment at a Premier’s At-home, and looking eminently graceful and pre-eminently weary in an ambassadress’ drawing room, and winding up the series by a dainty little supper in the gray of the morning, with a sparkling party of French actresses, as bright as the bubbles of their own Clicquot.

When he went upstairs to his own bedroom, in Piccadilly, about five o’clock, therefore, he was both sleepy and tired, and lamented to that cherished and ever-discreet confidant, a cheroot, the brutal demands of the Service; which would drag him off, in five hours’ time, without the slightest regard to his feelings, to take share in the hot, heavy, dusty, searching work of a field-day up at the Scrubs.

“Here—­get me to perch as quick as you can, Rake,” he murmured, dropping into an armchair; astonished that Rake did not answer, he saw standing by him instead the boy Berkeley.  Surprise was a weakness of raw inexperience that Cecil never felt; his gazette as Commander-in-Chief, or the presence of the Wandering Jew in his lodgings would never have excited it in him.  In the first place, he would have merely lifted his eyebrows and said, “Be a fearful bore!” in the second he would have done the same, and murmured, “Queer old cad!”

Surprised, therefore, he was not, at the boy’s untimely apparition; but his eyes dwelt on him with a mild wonder, while his lips dropped but one word: 

“Amber-Amulet?”

Amber-Amulet was a colt of the most marvelous promise at the Royallieu establishment, looked on to win the next Clearwell, Guineas, and Derby as a certainty.  An accident to the young chestnut was the only thing that suggested itself as of possibly sufficient importance to make his brother wait for him at five o’clock on a June morning.

Berkeley looked up confusedly, impatiently: 

“You are never thinking but of horses or women,” he said peevishly; “there may be others things in the world, surely.”

“Indisputably there are other things in the world, dear boy; but none so much to my taste,” said Cecil composedly, stretching himself with a yawn.  “With every regard to hospitality and the charms of your society, might I hint that five o’clock in the morning is not precisely the most suitable hour for social visits and ethical questions?”

“For God’s sake, be serious, Bertie!  I am the most miserable wretch in creation.”

Cecil opened his closed eyes, with the sleepy indifference vanished from them, and a look of genuine and affectionate concern on the serene insouciance of his face.

“Ah! you would stay and play that chicken hazard,” he thought, but he was not one who would have reminded the boy of his own advice and its rejection; he looked at him in silence a moment, then raised himself with a sigh.