He came back to London with the idea that he would be very glad to return again to the quiet of his chambers, where nothing ever happened. He said to himself that excursions into the outer world, where something was always happening, were a mistake. He had but stepped out of his hermitage without thinking, once in a way, to pay a visit which, after all, was a duty visit, when a whole tragedy came straightway about his ears--accident, death, sorrow, injustice, a heroine, and a cruel father, and all the materials of a full-blown romance. How glad he would be, he thought, to get into his hermitage again! Within its quiet centre there was everything a man wanted--books, an occasional cigar, an easy chair (when it was clear from papers and general literature) for a friend to sit in. But when he did get back, he was not so certain of its advantages: no doubt it was everything that could be desired--but yet, it was a hermitage, and the outlook from the windows was not cheerful. If Park Lane was brighter than the view across the park at Mount, the Albany, with its half-monastic shade, like a bit of a male _béguinage_, was less bright. He sat at his window, vaguely looking out--a thing he had never had the slightest inclination to do before--and felt an indescribable sense of the emptiness of his existence. Nor was this only because he had got used to the new charms of household life, and liked a house with women in it, as he had suggested to himself--not even that--it was an influence more subtle. He took Edward with him to Park Lane, and presented that hero, who did not understand his new relations. He thought Rose was ‘very jolly,’ but Anne alarmed him. And the ladies were not very favourably moved towards Edward. Heathcote had hoped that his young brother might be captivated by them, and that this might very possibly be the making of him: as the friends of an unsatisfactory young man are always so ready to hope. But the result did not justify his expectation. ‘If the little ‘un were by herself, without those two old fogeys, she might, perhaps, be fun,’ Edward thought, and then he gave his brother a description of the favourite Bet Bouncer of his predilections. This attempt having failed, Heathcote for his part did not fall into mere aimless fluttering about the house in Park Lane as for a time he had been tempted to do. It was not the mere charm of female society which had moved him. Life had laid hold upon him on various sides, and he could not escape into his shell, as of old. Just as Cosmo Douglas had felt, underneath all the external gratifications of his life, the consciousness that everybody was asking. ‘What Douglases does he belong to?’ so Heathcote, in the stillness of his chambers, was conscious that his neighbours were saying, ‘He is Mountford of Mount.’ As a matter of fact very few people knew anything about Mount--but it is hard even for the wisest to understand how matters which so deeply