Edgar did not well know where to go on his arrival in London. He knew nothing about London except in its most expensive regions, and the only place to which he could direct the driver of the cab into which he jumped, was the chambers in Piccadilly which he had occupied in his earlier days. He said to himself “For a day or two it cannot matter where I live;” and, besides, the season was over and everything cheap, or so, at least, Edgar thought. The first thing he had to do was to see that his lawyers had carried out his directions and paid his debts--the number of which appalled him--out of his capital. Decidedly it was time that he should do something, and should shake himself out of those habits of a rich man, which had, in these three years, though he had no idea of it, compromised him to the extent of half his little fortune. This debt he felt he could not trifle with. The more indifferent he was about money, and the better able he was to do without it, the more necessity was there for the clearing off to begin with, of everything in the shape of debt. After all was paid, and the residue settled on the old lady at Loch Arroch, there remained to him about a hundred pounds in the bank, besides the two ten-pound notes which he had in his pocket-book. “I must not touch the money in the bank,” he said to himself, with a prudence which contrasted beautifully with his other extravagances, “that must remain as something to fall back upon. Suppose, for instance, I should be ill,” Edgar reasoned with himself, always with a delicious suppressed consciousness of the joke involved under the utter gravity and extreme reasonableness of his own self-communings, “how necessary it would be to have something to fall back upon!” When he had made this little speech to himself, he subsided into silence, and it was not until half-an-hour later that he permitted himself to laugh.