of the earl’s blotting-pad and pens, had the look of a fearful link with his fallen chaps and fishy hue.  Potts maundered moralities upon ‘life,’ holding the thing in his hand, weighing it, eyeing the muzzle.  He ’couldn’t help thinking of what is going to happen to us after it all’:  and ‘Brosey knows now!’ was followed by a twitch of one cheek and the ejaculation ‘Forever !’ Fleetwood alive and Ambrose dead were plucking the startled worldling to a peep over the verge into our abyss; and the young lord’s evident doing of the same commanded Chumley Potts’ imitation of him under the cloud Ambrose had become for both of them.

He was recommended to see Lord Feltre, if he had a desire to be instructed on the subject of the mitigation of our pains in the regions below.  Potts affirmed that he meant to die a Protestant Christian.  Thereupon, carrying a leaden burden of unlaughed laughable stuff in his breast, and Chummy’s concluding remark to speed him:  ’Damn it, no, we’ll stick to our religion!’ Fleetwood strode off to his library, and with the names of the Ixionides of his acquaintance ringing round his head, proceeded to strike one of them off the number privileged at the moment to intrude on him.  Others would follow; this one must be the first to go.  He wrote the famous letter to Lord Brailstone, which debarred the wily pursuer from any pretext to be running down into Mrs. Levellier’s neighbourhood, and also precluded the chance of his meeting the fair lady at Calesford.  With the brevity equivalent to the flick of a glove on the cheek, Lord Brailstone was given to understand by Lord Fleetwood that relations were at an end between them.  No explanation was added; a single sentence executed the work, and in the third person.  He did not once reflect on the outcry in the ear of London coming from the receiver of such a letter upon payment of a debt.

The letter posted and flying, Lord Fleetwood was kinder to Chumley Potts; he had a friendly word for Gower Woodseer; though both were heathens, after their diverse fashions, neither of them likely ever to set out upon the grand old road of Rome:  Lord Feltre’s ’Appian Way of the Saints and Comforters.’

Chummy was pardoned when they separated at night for his reiterated allusions to the temptation of poor Ambrose Mallard’s conclusive little weapon lying on the library table within reach of a man’s arm-chair:  in its case, and the case locked, yes, but easily opened, ’provoking every damnable sort of mortal curiosity!’ The soundest men among us have their fits of the blues, Fleetwood was told.  ‘Not wholesome!’ Chummy shook his head resolutely, and made himself comprehensibly mysterious.  He meant well.  He begged his old friend to promise he would unload and keep it unloaded.  ’For I know the infernal worry you have—­deuced deal worse than a night’s bad luck!’ said he; and Fleetwood smiled sourly at the world’s total ignorance of causes.  His wretchedness was due now to the fact that the