Sir Richard sold the tazza to a dealer for two hundred and fifty francs, and a year or two later had the luck to buy it back, but he had to pay ten times the price and more. Often he had hard times enough, as he himself said when he told the story, but when Lord Hertford died in 1870 his day had come. The fortune which he inherited was in those days considered colossal. It would look less now compared with the huge riches of American plutocrats, but in 1870 these were yet in the making. Two very rich marriages, the second and third marquesses having both married heiresses, had, in addition to great landed estates, placed the Hertfords in an altogether exceptional position. The way in which the third and fourth lords elected to spend their wealth had woven round them a whole tissue of legends, chiefly founded upon mere vulgar gossip. Virtuous and highly-respectable London delighted in crowning them with a halo of ill-fame, and when Lord Yarmouth, afterwards fourth Marquess, bought Bagatelle, it was declared to be the scene of orgies compared with which the mysteries of the Bona Dea were as innocent as nursery teas. Many of the stories were started by the rather second-class, or even demirep, English Society which was gathered together at Paris, jealous at being kept out from the intimacy of a very exclusive man. These stories when repeated, we may be sure, lost nothing in the telling, and so Bagatelle came to be looked upon as a sort of Parc aux Cerfs, while Bishop Luscombe’s congregation stalked with virtuously uplifted noses along the Rue d’Aguesseau, thanking Heaven that they were not as Lord Hertford. Such a reputation, even if it were a mere scandalous libel, was hardly such as would commend itself to General Sir Francis Seymour, the proud patrician who was to succeed to the title as fifth Marquess. Indeed, it must have been gall and wormwood to a man trained as he had been for many years in the solemn dignity of the staid Victorian Court. There could be no sympathy, still less affection, between the cousins. But there was more than all this to influence Lord Hertford when he made his will, which left his successor practically nothing but the broad acres of Warwickshire, with a great costly palace to keep up, at a moment when land was falling in value every day and agriculture was drifting no man could tell whither.