Having borne the honeymoon with resignation, Kate endured her bad bargain _tête-à-tête_ at various watering-places, and amongst innumerable lakes and mountains of tourist notoriety, until she had taught him the only accomplishment she cared to inculcate, viz., obedience, which he learned very readily, seeing that it relieved him from all trouble and responsibility. This point accomplished, she took him to a fashionable hotel in St. James’s Street, where she wrote to her friend, Arabella Crofton, to join her. However, before that excellent young woman of the world had time to wind up the ends of a few trifling skeins of policy, with which she had been constructing nets for small birds at Baden-Baden, Horace D’Almayne found out the residence of the happy couple, and proceeded to call upon, dine with, and make himself generally useful and agreeable to them. Kate did not like him, but she had been for two months _tête-à-tête_ with Mr. Crane, and Horace possessed this advantage over that devoted husband, that he was _not_ a fool, and Mr. Crane was. Horace was not a fool; on the contrary, he was such a clever knave that it was really a pity that he was not something better: he saw the game he had to play, and he resolved to play it as skilfully as his faculties and experience would enable him. He possessed considerable insight into character, and sufficient tact to accommodate himself to the peculiarities, and avail himself of the weaknesses, he might thus discover. Accordingly, his first move was to endeavour to lull Kate’s suspicions of him, which he saw had been aroused; his next to make himself by degrees useful to her--necessary to her; then, let him win her confidence on any subject (he would have been delighted if she had told him the day of the month, or that she had dropped a pin, in _confidence_, for it would have been a beginning), until by word, look, or sign, she admitted her indifference towards her husband, and then the game would be his own. With Mr. Crane D’Almayne’s course appeared very simple. The millionaire’s one clear idea was the omnipotence of wealth; he knew D’Almayne was poor, and that he had lent him money which he never expected to be repaid. He considered him in the light of a sort of Master of the Ceremonies, who could guide him in the ways of fashionable life, whereof he felt his ignorance--a kind of upper upper-servant--the Vizier to his Caliphship, and he lent him money as a delicate way of paying his wages. At present D’Almayne was in high favour with Mr. Crane; his wife was looking very handsome, quite a gem of a wife--equal to his pictures or his port wine; D’Almayne had negotiated his marriage for him, and the speculation had been a successful one; he lent D’Almayne £500 before he had been in town a week. Horace saw it all, but he was not proud; as he would have said, “It suited his book too well,” so he pocketed his wages meekly.