“A bad set--yes, that is it. A man who begins life in a certain circle is like a workman who gets his arm or his leg caught unawares in a machine worked by steam power. In an instant he is entangled past rescue. He is gone. A man takes the wrong road. Ten years afterwards, perhaps, when he is bald and wrinkled, he may pull himself up on the downward track and try to get rid of a bad reputation and make a fresh start; but those fresh starts rarely end in a winning race. I am very sorry for my brother. He is a warm-hearted fellow, with a good deal of talent; and he ought not to have made a bad thing of his life.” “Let us hope that he has pulled up in time, and that he may get a young wife before he is many years older. I have no desire that my sister’s son should be a peer. I only want to see her happy with a husband who shall be worthy of her.” CHAPTER XIX. “I HAVE YOU STILL, THE SUN COMES OUT AGAIN.” The new year was just a week old, and Isola and Allegra were standing on a terraced hillside in a country where January has noontides as brilliant and balmy as an English June. They had travelled up that almost perpendicular hill in a roomy landau drawn by a pair of strong horses, and now, near the summit of the hill, on the last of those many terraces that zig-zag up the face of the cliff, they had alighted from the carriage, and were standing side by side upon the broad white road, at an angle where the cliff dipped suddenly, clothed with the wild growth of stunted olive and bushy pine, down and down to the abyss where the blue sea looked like a sapphire at the bottom of a pit. They stood and gazed, and gazed again, almost bewildered by the infinite beauty and variety of that dazzling prospect. Below them, in the shelter of the land-locked bay, Ospedaletti’s pavilioned Casino shone whitely out of a garden of palm and cactus, with terrace and balustrade vanishing down by the sea. To the right, the steep promontory of Bordighera jutted far out into the blue; and over the rugged crest of the hill Mentone’s long white front lay in a gentle curve, almost level with the sea--a strip of vivid white between the blue of the water and the gloom of that great barren mountain wall which marks the beginning of modern Italy. And beyond, again, showed the twin towers of Monaco; and further still, in the dim blue distance, rose the battlemented line of the Esterelles, dividing the fairyland of the Riviera from the workaday realities of shipbuilding Toulon and commercial Marseilles. On this side of those pine-clad mountains there were only pleasure and fancy, wealth, fashion, the languid invalid, and the feverish gambler; on the other side there were toilers and speculators, the bourse and the port, the world of stern fact.