Edward Fanshawe, the individual whose appearance at Tom Heriot’s funeral had excited Miss Jean’s curiosity so strongly, was, perhaps, about the last man in England to whom Mr. Heriot of Pitcomlie, or any other father, would have confided his daughter’s happiness. Almost all that could be said in his favour was negative. There was no harm in him. He had never been involved in any discreditable transaction; he had wronged nobody; he had not even bored his friends. A certain fine instinct, indeed, in this respect, possessed the man; he had no high moral qualities, no principles to speak of, no plan of life nor rule of action; but he was never a bore. He perceived, with the quickness of lightning, the moment when his friends had had enough of him. Perhaps that moment arrived simultaneously with the moment in which he felt that he had enough of them; anyhow, he chose it with the most admirable exactitude. It was the one great quality of his character; he was like the sun in Hood’s poem, which “never came an hour too soon,” and he never stayed a moment too late. Mr. Fanshawe was always agreeable, sympathetic, ready to interest himself in what interested those about him; he was a gentleman of the best blood and connections--cousin to Lord Strangeways, once removed, and allied by the mother’s side to the Duchess of Dimsdale, whose name is a sufficient guarantee, we trust, for any man’s gentility. He had just the amount of family and of money which is best adapted to demoralize a man, and turn him away from the natural and wholesome channels of use. And at the same time he had no land, no local habitation to keep up, no duties to do. What he had was in money, which a careful father had so locked up that the poor fellow could not even ruin himself by spending everything, and thus give himself the chance of a new start. He could only forestall his income, which he did continually, with more or less painful consequences to himself, and no great harm to anybody else; for he was weak-minded enough to have a prejudice in favour of paying his debts, though he seldom did it until considerably after date. He was not a fool, any more than he was a rogue; he was the very best, gentlest, most amiable, kind, and harmless of good-for-nothings; but a good-for-nothing he was. He had no vices, not even that of active selfishness, which, in such a man, might have been the first step to virtue. He was a little over thirty, but felt as if he had never been any younger, and never would be any older. He was not appalled by the thought of all the openings in life which he had thrown aside; or of the men who had passed him on the way, or of the advantages he had let slip. The past did not upbraid him, neither did the future alarm him. He never thought of asking himself what was to become of him when his active manhood began to droop. “To-morrow shall be as to-day,” he said to himself; or rather he did not say it, for he