To individuals, as is so often the case with men of this temper and of good birth, William Bailey was often kind and sometimes positively generous. The personal enmities he bore to men whom he had actually known, were very rare, and such as they were they would take the form rather of abstaining from their society than of intriguing against them. Indeed, characters of this sort are not usually possessed of that tenacity in action which intrigue requires. His name was mentioned with no woman's; he had never married. In early youth he was supposed to have felt some attraction to a lady considerably older than himself, who subsequently became the wife of another yet older than herself, an Anglo-Indian official of high standing. But the passion could hardly have been deep or lasting, for he preserved no relic of her in any form; he had no picture of her, he never mentioned her name, and when she returned to England from time to time, he made no effort to renew her acquaintance and seemed even to avoid her presence. Some have attempted to attribute his violent eccentricities of judgment to disappointed ambition. His career would hardly lead one to such a conclusion. As a boy he determined upon the Army, and had greatly annoyed his family, who would have preferred the Guards, by joining the Engineers. He had not been four years a sapper when he as suddenly abandoned that honourable and useful corps, and compelled his father to use influence for his appointment as an _attaché_--of all places in the world--to Pekin. Transferred from that distant capital to Paris, he begged for Constantinople, was granted it, and within two years abandoned the career of diplomacy as light-heartedly as he had abandoned that of arms. His father's death at this moment added to his already sufficient private means, and it was thought by such relatives as still took some interest in his talents that commercial activity would bring him into harness. A stall was purchased for him at Lloyds, and for three months he appeared to devote himself steadily to speculation. But the wisest of his relatives, especially his Aunt Winifred, still had their misgivings; they were amply justified.