Edward Blancove was three-and-twenty years old, a student by fits, and a young man given to be moody.  He had powers of gaiety far eclipsing Algernon’s, but he was not the same easy tripping sinner and flippant soul.  He was in that yeasty condition of his years when action and reflection alternately usurp the mind; remorse succeeded dissipation, and indulgences offered the soporific to remorse.  The friends of the two imagined that Algernon was, or would become, his evil genius.  In reality, Edward was the perilous companion.  He was composed of better stuff.  Algernon was but an airy animal nature, the soul within him being an effervescence lightly let loose.  Edward had a fatally serious spirit, and one of some strength.  What he gave himself up to, he could believe to be correct, in the teeth of an opposing world, until he tired of it, when he sided as heartily with the world against his quondam self.  Algernon might mislead, or point his cousin’s passions for a time; yet if they continued their courses together, there was danger that Algernon would degenerate into a reckless subordinate—­a minister, a valet, and be tempted unknowingly to do things in earnest, which is nothing less than perdition to this sort of creature.

But the key to young men is the ambition, or, in the place of it, the romantic sentiment nourished by them.  Edward aspired to become Attorney-General of these realms, not a judge, you observe; for a judge is to the imagination of youthful minds a stationary being, venerable, but not active; whereas, your Attorney-General is always in the fray, and fights commonly on the winning side,—­a point that renders his position attractive to sagacious youth.  Algernon had other views.  Civilization had tried him, and found him wanting; so he condemned it.  Moreover, sitting now all day at a desk, he was civilization’s drudge.  No wonder, then, that his dream was of prairies, and primeval forests, and Australian wilds.  He believed in his heart that he would be a man new made over there, and always looked forward to savage life as to a bath that would cleanse him, so that it did not much matter his being unclean for the present.

The young men had a fair cousin by marriage, a Mrs. Margaret Lovell, a widow.  At seventeen she had gone with her husband to India, where Harry Lovell encountered the sword of a Sikh Sirdar, and tried the last of his much-vaunted swordsmanship, which, with his skill at the pistols, had served him better in two antecedent duels, for the vindication of his lovely and terrible young wife.  He perished on the field, critically admiring the stroke to which he owed his death.  A week after Harry’s burial his widow was asked in marriage by his colonel.  Captains, and a giddy subaltern likewise, disputed claims to possess her.  She, however, decided to arrest further bloodshed by quitting the regiment.  She always said that she left India to save her complexion; “and people don’t know how very candid I am,” she added, for the colonel above-mentioned was wealthy,—­a man expectant of a title, and a good match, and she was laughed at when she thus assigned trivial reasons for momentous resolutions.  It is a luxury to be candid; and perfect candour can do more for us than a dark disguise.