With a slow step and a careless indolent manner, Jasper Denzil crossed the paved yard, and entered by a side-door the mansion that must one day in the course of nature be his, but of which as a place of residence we have already heard him express an opinion the reverse of flattering. There was very little at Carbery Chase to amuse the captain, cut off from his usual sources of excitement and a temporary exile from London and its pleasures. It was sorry work this pottering business of picking up a few ten-pound bets on country courses, or winning paltry stakes by the aid of wretched platers. It was better than nothing no doubt; precisely as at Monaco we see the ruined millionaire, Spanish or Russian, eagerly playing for silver when his last rouleaux of louis-d'or have taken wing; but he felt that it was a sore degradation for one whose dash and coolness had won dubious compliments from very great personages. Traversing a passage, Jasper presently crossed the great hall--full of costly marbles brought from Italy, in days when there were no manufacturers of the spurious antique--and opened the door of what was known as the morning-room, cheerful and bright as a morning-room should be, and overlooking the rose-garden, then glorious in its glow and blush of tender colour. Two ladies were the occupants of the room, both young and both pretty, though each of them had that likeness to Jasper (her only brother) which we so constantly trace in members of the same family. Lucy it is true was dark-haired and dark-eyed; while Blanche, the younger and taller of the two, was delicately--perhaps too delicately--fair of complexion, and had hair of the palest gold. Sir Sykes had been for several years a widower; and all the Denzil family, with the exception of the baronet himself, were now present in that room, through the French windows of which came stealing in the fresh scent of roses. ‘I saw you, Jasper, from the pheasantry, as you came up the park; but you did not see me,’ said Miss Denzil, smiling. ‘You did not stay, then, to see the finish of the Pebworth cricket-match?’ ‘I--no!’ answered Jasper with a yawn. ‘Cricket is amusing, I daresay, to those who knock the ball about, or to those who run to pick it up again, as the French countess said of our noble national game; but it is slow--fearfully slow.’ And the captain yawned again. ‘Most things are, I am afraid, at Carbery,’ said Blanche gently.--‘We have tried to amuse him--have we not, Lucy?--by dragging him with us to such primitive merry-makings as lay within driving distance, archery-meetings, flower-shows’----