no shame to bestow on me a word or a look of
kindness. The fellow is peremptory—he declares
I must leave to-day." For some time he
continued to walk, muttering to himself, or
moodily silent. At last he cried out, "Yes; I
have it"! I'll go up to Milan, and cash this bill
of Drayton's. When there, I'll telegraph to
Loyd, which will show I have left the villa.
That done, I'll return here, if it be but for a
day; and who knows what a day will bring
forth?"

"Who has commands for Milan?" said he,
gaily entering the drawing-room, where Miss
Grainger sat, holding a half-whispering
conversation with Emily.

"Milan! are you going to Milan?"

"Yes; only for a day. A friend has charged
me with a commission that does not admit of
delay, and I mean to run up this afternoon, and
be down by dinner-time to-morrow."

"I'll go and see if Florry wants anything
from the city," said Miss Grainger, as she arose
and left the room.

"Poor Florry! she is so distressed by that
letter she received this morning. Joseph has
taken it in such ill part that you should have
been consulted by Aunt Grainger, and reproaches
her for having permitted what she really never
heard of. Not that, as she herself says, she
admits of any right on his part to limit her source of
advice. She thinks that it is somewhat despotic
in him to say, 'You shall not take counsel
except with leave from me'. She knows that this
is the old vicar's doing, and that Joseph never
would have assumed that tone without being put
up to it."

"That is clear enough; but I am surprised
that your sister saw it."

"Oh, she is not so deplorably in love as to be
blinded."

CHAPTER XIII. AGAIN TO MILAN.

"POOR Bob! You were standing on that
balcony with a very jaunty air, smoking your
Cuban the last time I passed here," said Calvert,
as he looked up at the windows of the Hotel
Royale at Milan, while he drove on to another
and less distinguished hotel. He would have
liked greatly to have put up at the Royale,
and had a chat with its gorgeous landlord over
the Reppinghams, how long they stayed, and
whither they went, and how the young widow
bore up under the blow, and what shape old
Rep's grief assumed.

No squeamishness as to the terms that might
have been used towards himself would have
prevented his gratifying this wish. The obstacle
was purely financial. He had told the host, on
leaving, to pay a thousand francs for him that
he had lost at play, and it was by no means
convenient now to reimburse him. The bank had
just closed as he arrived, so there was nothing
for it but to await its opening the next morning.
His steps were then turned to the Telegraph-
office. The message to Loyd was in these
words: "Your letter received. I am here, and
leave to-morrow."

"Of course the fellow will understand that I
have obeyed his high behest, and I shall be back
at Orta in time to catch the post on its arrival,
and see whether he has kept faith with me or
not. If there be no newspapers there for the
villa I may conclude it is all right." This brief
matter of business over, he felt like one who
had no further occasion for care. When he laid
down his burden he could straighten his back,
no sense of the late pressure remaining to
remind him of the load that had pressed so heavily.
He knew this quality in himself, and prized it
highly. It formed part of what he used boastfully
to call his "Philosophy," and he contrasted it
proudly with the condition of those fellows who,
instead of rebounding under pressure, collapsed,
and sunk never to rise more. The vanity with
which he regarded himself supplied him with
a vindictive dislike to the world, who could
suffer a fellow endowed and gifted as he was to be
always in straits and difficulties. He mistook—
a very common mistake, by the way—a capacity
to enjoy, for a nature deservant of enjoyment,
and he thought it the greatest injustice to see
scores of well-off people who possessed neither
his own good constitution nor his capacity to
endure dissipation uninjured. "Wretches not
fit to live," as he said, and assuredly most unfit
to live the life which he alone prized or cared
for. He dined somewhat sumptuously at one
of the great restaurants. "He owed it, to
himself," he said, after all that dreary cookery of
the villa, to refresh his memory of the pleasures
of the table, and he ordered a flask of
Marcobrunner that cost a Napoleon.

He was the caressed of the waiters, and
escorted to the door by the host. There is no
supremacy so soon recognised as that of wealth,
and Calvert, for a few hours, gave himself up
to the illusion that he was rich. As the Opera
was closed, he went to one of the smaller theatres,
and sat out for a while one of those dreariest
of all dreary things, a comedy by the "immortal
Goldoni!" Immortal indeed, so long as sleep
remains an endowment of humanity! He tried
to interest himself in a plot wherein the
indecency was only veiled by the dulness, and
where the language of the drawing-room never
rose above the tone of the servants' hall, and
left the place in disgust, to seek anywhere, or
any how, something more amusing than this.

Without well knowing how, he found
himself at the door of the Jettone, the hell he
had visited when he was last at Milan.

"They shall sup me, at all events," said he,
as he deposited his hat and cane in the ante-
chamber. The rooms were crowded, and it was
some time before Calvert could approach the
play-table, and gain a view of the company. He
recognised many of the former visitors. There
sat the pretty woman with the blonde ringlets,
her diamond-studded fingers carelessly playing
with the gold pieces before her; there was the
pale student-like boy—he seemed a mere boy
—with his dress-cravat disordered, and his hair
dishevelled, just as he had seen him last; and
there was the old man, whose rouleau had cost