How strangely different from the old days, in which so many fair women would smile and listen to the young man who was at once so rich and so original, a great landed proprietor, with the opinions of a revolutionary. It was not his downfall, however, which had made all the difference, which was a comfort to him; for, indeed, the families whom he had once visited were out of London. Sometimes it occurred to him that if the Thornleighs had been in town, he would have gone to them and asked leave to be admitted just once or twice, for pure charity, and he had walked several times past their house in Berkeley Square, and gazed at its closed shutters with half a notion of calling on the housekeeper, at least, and asking to see the place in which he had spent so many pleasant hours. He used to live all over again his first visit to London, with an amused pleasure in recalling all his own puzzles and difficulties. He seemed to himself to have been a boy then, almost a child, playing with fate and his life, and understanding nothing of all that was around him. To have ten thousand a year one time, and no income at all the next, but only a hundred pounds in the bank “to fall back upon,” and the vague promise of a post as Queen’s Messenger at Christmas--what a change it was! Though to be sure, even now, Edgar said to himself, there were more people in London worse off than he, than there were people who were better off. A hundred pounds in the bank is, in reality, a fortune--as long as you can keep it there; and a man who has the post of Queen’s Messenger is independent, which is as much as any prince can be. All these philosophisings were wonderfully true, but they did not take away the uncomfortable, desolate, profitless sensation of living alone in London without friends, doing nothing except live, which, when you live for the mere sake of living, and because you can’t help it, is, perhaps, the dreariest occupation on earth. And in November--when London is at its worst, and the year at its worst, when the gloomy daylight is short, and the weary nights are long, and when everything that bears the guise of amusement palls upon the man who has nothing to do but amuse himself. Sometimes Edgar, in momentary desperation, thought of rushing off to his former haunts abroad, sometimes of turning back to Loch Arroch, helping in whatever might be doing, getting some share in human life, and some place among his fellows; but then the remembrance would strike him that, now-a-days, he could not do what he pleased, that he had no money but that hundred pounds in the bank, and no way of getting any now till the appointment came.