“Of course, it’s Ned’s money.  I’d give it if I had it, but I haven’t; and the fellow won’t take a farthing less; I know him.  However, it’s my duty to try.”

He summoned a vehicle.  It was a boast of his proud youth that never in his life had he ridden in a close cab.  Flinging his shoulders back, he surveyed the world on foot.  “Odd faces one sees,” he meditated.  “I suppose they’ve got feelings, like the rest; but a fellow can’t help asking—­what’s the use of them?  If I inherit all right, as I ought to—­why shouldn’t I?—­I’ll squat down at old Wrexby, garden and farm, and drink my Port.  I hate London.  The squire’s not so far wrong, I fancy.”

It struck him that his chance of inheriting was not so very obscure, after all.  Why had he ever considered it obscure?  It was decidedly next to certain, he being an only son.  And the squire’s health was bad!

While speculating in this wise he saw advancing, arm-in-arm, Lord Suckling and Harry Latters.  They looked at him, and evidently spoke together, but gave neither nod, nor smile, nor a word, in answer to his flying wave of the hand.  Furious, and aghast at this signal of exclusion from the world, just at the moment when he was returning to it almost cheerfully in spirit, he stopped the cab, jumped out, and ran after the pair.

“I suppose I must say Mr. Latters,” Algernon commenced.

Harry deliberated a quiet second or two.  “Well, according to our laws of primogeniture, I don’t come first, and therefore miss a better title,” he said.

“How are you?” Algernon nodded to Lord Suckling, who replied, “Very well, I thank you.”

Their legs were swinging forward concordantly.  Algernon plucked out his purse.  “I have to beg you to excuse me,” he said, hurriedly; “my cousin Ned’s in a mess, and I’ve been helping him as well as I can—­bothered—­not an hour my own.  Fifty, I think?” That amount he tendered to Harry Latters, who took it most coolly.

“A thousand?” he queried of Lord Suckling.

“Divided by two,” replied the young nobleman, and the Blucher of bank-notes was proffered to him.  He smiled queerly, hesitating to take it.

“I was looking for you at all the Clubs last night,” said Algernon.

Lord Suckling and Latters had been at theirs, playing whist till past midnight; yet is money, even when paid over in this egregious public manner by a nervous hand, such testimony to the sincerity of a man, that they shouted a simultaneous invitation for him to breakfast with them, in an hour, at the Club, or dine with them there that evening.  Algernon affected the nod of haste and acquiescence, and ran, lest they should hear him groan.  He told the cabman to drive Northward, instead of to the South-west.  The question of the thousand pounds had been decided for him—­“by fate,” he chose to affirm.  The consideration that one is pursued by fate, will not fail to impart a sense of dignity even to the meanest.  “After