Death came, all too surely; and the neighbourhood, struck with consternation, grieved sincerely for Mr. Dalrymple. "If Mr. Robert had but let me draw that charge from his gun, the Squire would have been here now," bewailed Hardy, the gamekeeper. CHAPTER IV. AT CHENEVIX HOUSE. It was a magnificent room, everything magnificent about it, as it was fitting the library of Chenevix House should be: a fine mansion overlooking Hyde Park. What good is there to be imagined--worldly good--that fortune, so capricious in her favours, had not showered down upon the owner of this house, the Earl of Acorn? None. With his majority he had come into a princely income, for his father, the late earl, died years before, and the estates had been well nursed. Better had it been, though, for the young Earl of Acorn that he had been born a younger son, or in an inferior rank of life. With that spur to exertion, necessity, he would have pushed on and _exercised_ the talents which had been liberally bestowed on him; but gliding as he did into a fortune that seemed unlimited, he plunged into every extravagant folly of the day, and did his best to dissipate it. He was twenty-one then; he is walking about his library now--you may see him if you choose to enter it--with some five-and-thirty good years added to his life: pacing up and down in perplexity, and possessing scarcely a shilling that he can call his own. His six-and-fifty years have rendered his slender figure somewhat portly, and an expression of annoyance is casting its shade on his clear brow and handsome features; but no deeper lines of sorrow are marked there. Not upon these careless natures does the hand of care leave its sign. But the earl is--to make the best of it--in a brown study, and he scowls his eyebrows, and purses his lips, and motions with his hands as he paces there, communing with himself. Not that he is so much perplexed as to how he shall escape his already great embarrassments, as he is to contriving the means to raise more money to rush into greater. The gratification of the present moment--little else ever troubled Lord Acorn. A noise of a cab in the street, as it whirls along, and pulls up before the steps and stately pillars of Chenevix House; a knock and a ring that send their echoes through the mansion; and the earl strides forward and looks cautiously from the window, so as to catch a glimpse of the horse and vehicle. It was only a glimpse, for the window was high from the ground, its embrasures deep, and the cab close to the pavement; and, for a moment, he could not decide whether it belonged to friend or foe; but soon he drew away with an ugly word, crossed the room to unlatch the door, and stood with his ear at the opening. What! a peer condescend to play eavesdropper, in an attitude that befits a meaner man? Yes: and a prince has done the same, when in bodily fear of duns.