“That was when I was Mr. Carvel’s heir, Banks.”

“And your face and figure, sir, and masterful ways!  Faith, and what more would a lady want!” Banks’s notions of morality were vague enough, and he would have had me sink what I had left at hazard at Almack’s.  He had lived in this atmosphere.  Alas! there was little chance of my ever regaining the position I had held but yesterday.  I thought of the sponging-house, and my brow was moist.  England was no place, in those days, for fallen gentlemen.  With us in the Colonies the law offered itself.  Mr. Swain, and other barristers of Annapolis, came to my mind, for God had given me courage.  I would try the law.  For I had small hopes of defeating my Uncle Grafton.

The Sunday morning dawned brightly, and the church bells ringing brought me to my feet, and out into Piccadilly, in the forlorn hope that I might see my lady on her way to morning service,—­see her for the last time in life, perhaps.  Her locket I wore over my heart.  It had lain upon hers.  To see her was the most exquisite agony in the world.  But not to see her, and to feel that she was scarce quarter of a mile away, was beyond endurance.  I stood beside an area at the entrance to Arlington Street, and waited for an hour, quite in vain; watching every face that passed, townsmen in their ill-fitting Sunday clothes, and fine ladies with the footmen carrying velvet prayerbooks.  And some that I knew only stared, and others gave me distant bows from their coach windows.  For those that fall from fashion are dead to fashion.

Dorothy did not go to church that day.

It is a pleasure, my dears, when writing of that hour of bitterness, to record the moments of sweetness which lightened it.  As I climbed up to my rooms in Dover Street, I heard merry sounds above, and a cloud of smoke blew out of the door when I opened it.

“Here he is,” cried Mr. Fox.  “You see, Richard, we have not deserted you when we can win no more of your money.”

“Why, egad! the man looks as if he had had a calamity,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick.

“And there is not a Jew here,” Fox continued.  “Tho’ it is Sunday, the air in my Jerusalem chamber is as bad as in any crimps den in St. Giles’s.  ’Slife, and I live to be forty, I shall have as many underground avenues as his Majesty Louis the Eleventh.”

“He must have a place,” put in my Lord Carlisle.

“We must do something for him,” said Fox, “albeit he is an American and a Whig, and all the rest of the execrations.  Thou wilt have to swallow thy golden opinions, my buckskin, when we put thee in office.”

I was too overwhelmed even to protest.

“You are not in such a cursed bad way, when all is said, Richard,” said Fitzpatrick.  “Charles, when he loses a fortune, immediately borrows another.”

“If you stick to whist and quinze,” said Charles, solemnly, giving me the advice they were forever thrusting upon him, “and play with system, you may make as much as four thousand a year, sir.”