is easily dashed; and if he had but said to Lord Suckling that, it might as well be deferred, the thing would have become a precedent, and his own debt might have been held back.  He went on saying, as he rushed forward alone:  “Never mind, Suckling.  Oh, hang it! put it in your pocket;” and the imperative necessity for talking, and fancying what was adverse to fact, enabled him to feel for a time as if he had really acted according to the prompting of his wisdom.  It amazed him to see people sitting and listening.  The more he tried it, the more unendurable it became.  Those sitters and loungers appeared like absurd petrifactions to him.  If he abstained from activity for ever so short a term, he was tormented by a sense of emptiness; and, as he said to himself, a man who has eaten a chicken, and part of a game-pie, and drunk thereto Champagne all day, until the popping of the corks has become as familiar as minute-guns, he can hardly be empty.  It was peculiar.  He stood, just for the sake of investigating the circumstance—­it was so extraordinary.  The music rose in a triumphant swell.  And now he was sure that he was not to be blamed for thinking this form of entertainment detestable.  How could people pretend to like it?  “Upon my honour!” he said aloud.  The hypocritical nonsense of pretending to like opera-music disgusted him.

“Where is it, Algy?” a friend of his and Suckling’s asked, with a languid laugh.

“Where’s what?”

“Your honour.”

“My honour?  Do you doubt my honour?” Algernon stared defiantly at the inoffensive little fellow.

“Not in the slightest.  Very sorry to, seeing that I have you down in my book.”

“Latters?  Ah, yes,” said Algernon, musically, and letting his under-lip hang that he might restrain the impulse to bite it.  “Fifty, or a hundred, is it?  I lost my book on the Downs.”

“Fifty; but wait till settling-day, my good fellow, and don’t fiddle at your pockets as if I’d been touching you up for the money.  Come and sup with me to-night.”

Algernon muttered a queer reply in a good-tempered tone, and escaped him.

He was sobered by that naming of settling-day.  He could now listen to the music with attention, if not with satisfaction.  As he did so, the head of drowned memory rose slowly up through the wine-bubbles in his brain, and he flung out a far thought for relief:  “How, if I were to leave England with that dark girl Rhoda at Wrexby, marry her like a man, and live a wild ramping life in the colonies?” A curtain closed on the prospect, but if memory was resolved that it would not be drowned, he had at any rate dosed it with something fresh to occupy its digestion.

His opera-glass had been scouring the house for a sight of Mrs. Lovell, and at last she appeared in Lord Elling’s box.