The privacy thus secured had been much to the taste of Lord Eldon. Doubt and delay flourish best in a close and dusty atmosphere; and if ever there was a man to whom that which was was right, it was “Old Bags.” Nor had Lord Lyndhurst, his immediate successor, quarrelled with an arrangement which left him at liberty to devote his time to society and his beautiful wife. But the man who now sat in the marble chair was of another kind from either of these. His worst enemy could not lay dulness to his charge; nor could he who lectured the Whitbreads on brewing, who explained their art to opticians, who vied with Talleyrand in the knowledge of French literature, who wrote eighty articles for the first twenty numbers of the “Edinburgh Review,” be called a sluggard. Confident of his powers, Brougham loved to display them; and the wider the arena the better he was pleased. His first sitting had been graced by the presence of three royal dukes, a whole Cabinet, and a score of peers in full dress. Having begun thus auspiciously, he was not the man to vegetate in the gloom of a dry-as-dust court, or to be content with an audience of suitors, whom equity, blessed word, had long stripped of their votes. Again and again during the last six months, by brilliant declamations or by astounding statement, he had filled his court to the last inch. The lions in the Tower, the tombs in the Abbey, the New Police—all were deserted; and countryfolk flocked to Westminster, not to hear the judgments of the highest legal authority in the land, but to see with their own eyes the fugleman of reform—the great orator, whose voice, raised at the Yorkshire election, had found an echo that still thundered in the ears and the hearts of England. “I am for Reform!” he had said in the castle yard of York; and the people of England had answered: “So are we; and we will have it, or——” The lacuna they had filled, not with words, but with facts stronger than words—with the flames of Kentish farmhouses and Wiltshire factories; with political unions counting their numbers by scores of thousands; with midnight drillings and vague and sullen murmurings; above all, with the mysterious terror of some great change which was to come—a terror that shook the most thoughtless and affected even the Duke, as men called the Duke of Wellington in that day. For was not every crown on the Continent toppling? Vaughan did not suppose that, in view of the startling event of the day, he would be admitted. But the usher, who occupied a high stool outside the great man’s door, no sooner read his card than he slid to the ground. “I think his lordship will see you, sir,” he murmured blandly; and he disappeared. He was back on the instant, and, beckoning to Vaughan to follow him, he proceeded some paces along a murky corridor, which the venerable form of Eldon seemed still to haunt. Opening a door, he stood aside.