Next day he took his bag and was off, but he promised to be home before the end of the week, and he promised still more sincerely, in private to Mr. Clutterbuck, to do everything that could possibly be done, and if he failed, to form some further plan. He was careful not to use any of the cars--he had used them quite enough lately, and the weather was foul. He took the train in the common fashion and drove from Victoria straight to Barnett House. The telephone had prepared them for his visit, and the Duke of Battersea, always the kindest and the warmest of friends to the young men of his rank, took him affectionately into the inner room, and heard all he might have to say. * * * * * The Duke of Battersea, now well stricken in years, was of that kind which age matures and perfects. The bitter struggles of his youth when, in part a foreigner, ill acquainted with our tongue and bewildered by many of our national customs, he had made his entry into English finance, had given him all the wisdom such trials convey, but they had left nothing of that bitterness too often bred in the souls of those who suffer. The failure of the Haymarket Bank would not indeed have checked so tenacious a character, but the undeserved obloquy which he suffered in the few years succeeding that misfortune, and during the period when it was falsely imagined that he had finally failed, might have put him out of touch with the national life and have given him a false and uncharitable estimate of the country of his adoption. So far from permitting any such acidity to warp his soul, Mr. Barnett (as he then was) had but the more faithfully gone forward in the path which destiny offered him, and he had reaped the reward which modern England never fails to give to those of her sons who have preserved, throughout all the vicissitudes of life, a true sense of proportion and a proper balance between material prosperity and the public service. When he had been raised to the peerage as Lord Lambeth, a vigorous man of fifty years, not only was his public position assured, but that respect for a firm character and a just maintenance of a man's own establishment in the world which should accompany such a position, was deeply founded in the mind of the general public. The newspapers, through which the great mass of our fellow citizens obtain their information, mentioned him not only continually, but with invariable deference, and often with admiration. His efforts in the House of Lords in favour of Bosnian freedom, and in the particular case of Macchabee Czernwitz, had proclaimed just that disinterested enthusiasm which we love to see applied by our great men to foreign affairs; while, nearer home, the Organ Grinders' Bill, for which he was mainly responsible, was a piece of practical legislation which had obtained general recognition upon both sides of either House.