“Good-bye, Lady Dumbello,” he said, on the next evening.  “I start early to-morrow morning.”

“Good-bye, Mr Palliser.”

As she spoke she smiled ever so sweetly, but she certainly had not learned to call him Plantagenet as yet.  He went up to London and immediately got himself to work.  The accurate and voluminous speech came off with considerable credit to himself,—­credit of that quiet, enduring kind which is accorded to such men.  The speech was respectable, dull, and correct.  Men listened to it, or sat with their hats over their eyes, asleep, pretending to do so; and the daily Jupiter in the morning had a leading article about it, which, however, left the reader at its close altogether in doubt whether Mr Palliser might be supposed to be a great financial pundit or no.  Mr Palliser might become a shining light to the moneyed world, and a glory to the banking interests; he might be a future Chancellor of the Exchequer.  But then again, it might turn out that, in these affairs, he was a mere ignis fatuus, a blind guide,—­a man to be laid aside as very respectable, but of no depth.  Who, then, at the present time, could judiciously risk his credit by declaring whether Mr Palliser understood his subject or did not understand it?  We are not content in looking to our newspapers for all the information that earth and human intellect can afford; but we demand from them what we might demand if a daily sheet could come to us from the world of spirits.  The result, of course, is this,—­that the papers do pretend that they have come daily from the world of spirits; but the oracles are very doubtful, as were those of old.

Plantagenet Palliser, though he was contented with this article, felt, as he sat in his chambers in the Albany, that something else was wanting to his happiness.  This sort of life was all very well.  Ambition was a grand thing, and it became him, as a Palliser and a future peer, to make politics his profession.  But might he not spare an hour or two for Amaryllis in the shade?  Was it not hard, this life of his?  Since he had been told that Lady Dumbello smiled upon him, he had certainly thought more about her smiles than had been good for his statistics.  It seemed as though a new vein in his body had been brought into use, and that blood was running where blood had never run before.  If he had seen Lady Dumbello before Dumbello had seen her, might he not have married her?  Ah! in such case as that, had she been simply Miss Grantly, or Lady Griselda Grantly, as the case might have been, he thought he might have been able to speak to her with more ease.  As it was, he certainly had found the task difficult, down in the country, though he had heard of men of his class doing the same sort of thing all his life.  For my own part, I believe that the reputed sinners are much more numerous than the sinners.