Edgar read this letter with a great and sharp pang of disappointment. An hour before, had anyone asked him, he would have said he had no faith whatever in Lord Newmarch; yet now he felt, by the keenness of his mortification, that he had expected a great deal more than he had ever owned even to himself. He flung the letter down on the table beside him, and covered his face with his hands. It seemed to him that he had lost one of the primary supports on which, without knowing, he had been building of late. Now was there nothing before Gussy’s betrothed--he who had ventured to entangle her fate with his, and to ask of parents and friends to bless the bargain--but a tutorship in a great house, and kind Mr. Tottenham’s favour, who was no great man, nor had any power, nor anything but mere money. He could not marry Gussy upon Mr. Tottenham’s money, or take her to another man’s house, to be a cherished and petted dependent, as they had made him. I don’t think it was till next day, when again the wheel had gone momentarily round, and he had set out on Clare’s business, leaving Gussy behind him, that he observed the pregnant and pithy postscript, which threw a certain gleam of light upon Lord Newmarch’s letter. “How should you like a Consulship?” Edgar had no great notion what a Consulship was. What kind of knowledge or duties was required for the humblest representative of Her Majesty, he knew almost as little as if this functionary had been habitually sent to the moon. “Should I like a Consulship?” he said to himself, as the cold, yet cheerful sunshine of early Spring streamed over the bare fields and hedgerows which swept past the windows of the railway carriage in which he sat. A vague exhilaration sprang up in his mind--perhaps from that thought, perhaps from the sunshine only, which always had a certain enlivening effect upon this fanciful young man. Perhaps, after all, though he did not at first know what it was, this was the thing that he could do, and which all his friends were pledged to get for him. And once again he forgot all about his present errand, and amused himself, as he rushed along, by attempts to recollect what the Consul was like at various places he knew where such a functionary existed, and what he did, and how he lived. The only definite recollection in his mind was of an office carefully shut up during the heat of the day, with cool, green _persiane_ all closed, a soft current of air rippling over a marble floor, and no one visible but a dreamy Italian clerk, to tell when H. B. M.’s official representative would be visible. “I could do that much,” Edgar said to himself, with a smile of returning happiness; but what the Consul did when he was visible, was what he did not know. No doubt he would have to sing exceedingly small when there was an ambassador within reach, or even the merest butterfly of an _attaché_, but apart from such gorgeous personages, the Consul, Edgar knew, had a certain importance.