QUITE ALONE.

BOOK THE FIRST: CHILDHOOD.
CHAPTER III. NURSE PIGOTT.

THE Chiswick festival came to an end, and the
company departed. Griffin Blunt lingered to
the last, and wound his way to the door of
egress, through a silken labyrinth of polite
conversations and bowing adieux. Ivanhoff's
last aria, and Malibran's last cadence; Prince
Esterhazy's last conversazione, and the Duke
of Devonshire's last ball at Brighton; the odds
for the St. Leger, the beauties of drawn tulle
bonnets; taste and the musical glasses—without
Shakspeare—had each their graceful mention, as
Blunt fluttered in and about the parterres of
beauty and fashion. The scene at the gate was
like the crush-room at the Opera, only with mellow
sunlight turned on, instead of garish gas—like
the "pin" at St. James's without the trains and
plumes. The company had begun to yawn.
Even Fashion is not exempt from the laws of
fatigue; and perhaps one reason why great
people grow tired of one another, is that they
see one another so frequently—the endurable
world being so extremely small.

Mr. Blunt had divers offers of conveyance to
town. He might have continued a Squire of
Dames to the last, and sat behind the most
expensively jobbed horses in the metropolis.
But he courteously declined all such proposals.
He had a little business to transact, he said, and
he was everybody's humble and devoted servant.
He remained, however, chatting, bowing, smiling,
until the crush grew thin, until the shamefaced
people who had come down in glass-coaches
and hackneys took heart of grace and bade the
red jackets summon their hired vehicles, and
until one or two attachés of foreign legations,
and hardened Guardsmen, kindled their cigars
before strolling away. In justice to them it
must be admitted, that even these offenders
peeped round to see there were no ladies near.
Now-a-days, shame and the smoker have been
hopelessly divorced. So far from hesitating as
to lighting a cigar in a lady's presence, the
worshipper of nicotine well-nigh presumes to ask
Beauty for a Vesuvian. A qui la faute? Is
Beauty or BÅ“otia to blame?

The trees of Chiswick were bathed in crimson
and burnished gold, and cast shadows of deepest
purple, before Blunt himself ventured to light
his cigar. When he began to smoke, he
smoked vigorously, and as he walked away with
a firm hasty tread, the white wreaths of vapour
circling behind him, his gait seemed very different
from that of the mincing tripping exquisite of
half an hour ago. Had you had Fortunatus's cap,
or had you been in the receipt of fern seed, you
might have availed yourself of the privilege of
invisibility, trodden on his varnished heel—marked
how nervously he turned and started, although
he had but scrunched a pebble—and then,
looking in his face, have discovered, not without
amazement, that his face was as the face of an
old man.

Terribly jaded, haggard, and careworn. A
film seemed to have come over the eyes. No
silver, but a rust rather, mingled with the jetty
hair and whiskers. And the smile had fled away
from the mouth, and left only furrows of cruelty
and hardness there.

He struck into a by-lane, green and solitary as
though it had been fifty miles from London, and
walking rapidly, soon came upon a mean little
wayside tavern, all thatch and ivy and honeysuckle,
and with the sign of the Goat swinging
before it. He passed through the bar, where
two market gardeners sprawled over their pipes
and beer on a bench—one, awake and uproarious;
the other, asleep and snoring; both as happy,
doubtless, as the Great Mogul. He turned to a
little side-window, and in the most unaffected
manner in the world ordered a glass of brandy.
He, order brandy! Nevertheless, he not only
did order brandy, but drank it without flinching;
and, what is still more singular, paid for it—a
performance to which he was, to say the least,
unaccustomed. However, this was to be for Mr.
Blunt an evening unusually marked by the
disbursement of ready money.

"There is a person here with a child," he
said, less asking a question than asserting
something of which he entertained no doubt.

"In the parlour, sir," the landlady replied,
with a low curtsey; for gentlemen so gallantly
accoutred were by no means frequent customers
at the Goat.

He looked inquiringly for the parlour's whereabout.
The landlady bustled from behind her
counter, and ushered him into a little room
at the extremity of the passage, and then