When the party assembled for dinner on the day of Mr. Churchill's hurried departure from the Grange, they found they had an addition in the person of Mr. Commissioner Beresford, who arrived late in the afternoon, and did not make his appearance until dinner-time. A man of middle height and dapper figure, always faultlessly dressed; slightly bald, but with his light-coloured hair well arranged over his large forehead; with deep-sunk, small, stony-gray eyes, a nose with the nostrils scarcely sufficiently covered, and a large mouth, with long white teeth. He had small white--dead-white--hands, with filbert nails, and very small feet. There was in the normal and ordinary expression of his face something sour and mordant, which, so far as his eyes were concerned, occasionally faded out in conversation, giving place to a quaint, comic look; but the mouth never changed; it was always fox-like, cruel, and bad. There was no better-known man in London; high and low, rich and poor, gentle and simple, all had heard of Charley Beresford. Citizen of the world, where was he out of place? When there was a tight wedge on the staircase of Protocol House on the Saturday nights when Lady Helmsman received; when at a foot-pace the fashionable world endured hours of martyrdom in procession to the shrine which, once reached, was passed in an instant, according as sole trophy the reminiscence of a bow,--Mr. Beresford was to be seen leaning over the stoutest of dowagers, and looking fresh and undrooping even when pressed upon by the pursiest of diplomatists. When the noble souls of the Body Guards were dismayed within the huge carcasses which contained them because it was whispered that the 180th Hussars intended to wear white hats on their drag to the Derby, and to deck their persons and their horses with blue rosettes--both which insignia had hitherto been distinctive of the Body Guards--it was Charley Beresford who was applied to on the emergency; and who, on the Derby morning, turned the tables completely by bringing the Body Guards from Limmer's straw-thatched and amber-rosetted to a man. The 180th and their blue were nowhere; and "Go it, yaller!" and "Brayvo, Dunstable!" were the cries all down the road. When Mr. Peter Plethoric, the humorous comedian of the Nonpareil Theatre, wanted some special patronage for his benefit, "Charley, dear boy!" was his connecting link with that aristocracy whose suffrages he sought. He went into every phase of society: he had an aunt the widow of a cabinet minister, who lived in Eaton Square; and an uncle a bishop, who lived in Seamore Place; and he dined with them regularly two or three times in the season, lighting his cigar within a few yards of the house, and quietly strolling down to the Argyll Rooms, or to the green-room of the theatre, or to the parlour of a sporting-public to get the latest odds on a forthcoming fight. He turned up his coat-collar of late when he visited these last-named places, and the