Mr. Jerningham had furnished his house after his own fashion, without regard to the styles that were “in,” or the styles that were “out.” One rich carpet of dark crimson velvet-pile lined the house from the hall to the attics, like a jewel-casket; and the same warm and yet sombre tint pervaded the window-hangings and the walls. The ordinary visitor found very little to admire in Mr. Jerningham’s drawing-room. Thin-legged tables and chairs adorned with goats’ heads and festoons of flowers; a shabby little writing-table, considerably the worse for wear, but enlivened by patches of china, whereon rosy little Cupids frisked and tumbled against a background of deep azure; a generally untidy effect of scattered bronzes and intaglios, gold-and-enamel snuff-boxes and bonbonnières, Chelsea tea-cups, and antique miniatures; and on the walls some tapestry, just a little faded, with the eternal shepherds and shepherdesses of the Watteau school. The connoisseur only could have told that the spindle-legged chairs and tables were in the purest style of the Louis-Seize period; that the shabby little writing-table with the _plaques_ of old Sèvres had belonged to Marie Antoinette, and had been sold for something over a thousand pounds; that the bronzes and intaglios, the miniatures and bonbonnières were the representatives of a fortune; and that the somewhat faded tapestry was the choicest work of the Gobelins, after designs by Boucher. Harold Jerningham was fifty years of age, and one of the richest men in London. The poorer members of the world in which he lived talked of him as “a lucky fellow, by Jove, and a man who ought to consider himself uncommonly fortunate never to have known what it was to be hard-up, or to have a pack of extravagant sons sucking his blood, like so many modern vampires, confound ’em!” Harold Jerningham had neither sons nor daughters, and lived in a bachelor’s snuggery. But Harold Jerningham was not a bachelor. He had married a very beautiful young first cousin some seven years before, and the union had not been a happy one. It had only endured for two years, at the end of which time the husband and wife had separated, without open scandal of any kind whatsoever. Mr. Jerningham had chosen that occasion for a long-postponed journey to the East, and Mrs. Jerningham had quietly withdrawn herself from the toy-house in Park Lane to another toy-house on the banks of the Thames, within two or three hundred yards of Wolsey’s old palace at Hampton. But let man and wife arrange their affairs never so quietly, the world will have its own ideas, and make its own theories on the subject. The world--that is to say, Mr. Jerningham’s world, which was bounded on the south by Great George Street, Westminster, and on the north by Bryanstone Square--told several different stories of Mr. Jerningham’s marriage. The beautiful young cousin had possessed the real Jerningham pride, which was the