He had taken existence lightly, and had taught himself to believe that the ills of life which press most heavily on other men had left him unscathed; but there were times in which the tide that carried him along so pleasantly seemed all at once to come to a dead stop. The rapid river was transformed into a dreary patch of stagnant water, black with foul weeds, and poisonous with fatal miasmas; and Mr. Jerningham was compelled to acknowledge that no man, of his own election, can resign his share in the sorrows of humanity. He told himself very often that he had done with emotion, and that life henceforth must be for him an affair of sensation only; his peace of mind depended on the perfect adjustment of his _ménage_ when he was at home, and on the tact of his courier when he travelled. But there were moments in which the subtle voice of his conscience whispered that this was only one more among the many delusions of his life. Thus, when circumstances transpired to prove that his young wife’s heart had been given to another, even while her honour was yet unsullied, he had arranged an immediate separation, with the nonchalance of a man who settles the most trivial affair in the business of life, fancying that he should escape thereby all those slow agonies and bitter throes that are wont to rack the breasts of men who find themselves compelled to part from their wives. But in this, as in all other transactions of his existence, he had been the dupe of his own selfish philosophy. The sting of his wife’s ingratitude was none the less keen because he thrust her from him with a careless hand. The sense of his own desolation was none the less intense because he had not suffered himself to love the woman to whom he had given his name. Even considered from a selfish man’s point of view, his Horatian philosophy of indifference had been a failure. The fact that it had been so, and that he might have lived a better life for himself in living a little for other people, was just beginning to dawn upon him. One pure pleasure he was to taste on this day--the pleasure that springs from real friendship. That one unselfish impulse which had prompted him to provide a pleasant home for an old friend, won him an ample return. Theodore de Bergerac’s welcome touched him to the heart. It was so warm, so real, so different from the polished flatteries he had been of late accustomed to receive, with a conventional smile upon his lips and the bitterness of unspeakable scorn in his heart. To this man, so courted, so flattered, it was a new thing to know himself honestly loved. De Bergerac was delighted by his friend’s return. “I thought we were never to see you again, Jerningham,” he said, after the first welcomes had been spoken, the first inquiries made; “and this little girl here, has been so anxious to behold her benefactor. I think she is more grateful to you for her big black dog than for the home that has sheltered her since her birth.”