“I think you presume a little too much on our long friendship,” said Arthur, seizing his hat. “Good night; there has been enough of this. Things will be bad indeed with me, I promise you, if, after this speech of yours, I ever come to you again.” He rushed out of the room before the other could reply. Durant went to the window and looked after him with a wistful subdued light of pity and tenderness in his face. “I wonder how long it will be first?” he said to himself. CHAPTER III. Lewis Durant was the _ami de l’enfance_ of Arthur Curtis. He had always been a little bigger, a little stronger, a little steadier, as he was a little older than his friend. He was not a young man of family like Arthur; and Lady Curtis, who was philosophical in her tendencies, had pointed many a social criticism by the fact, laughingly commented upon, that her son’s fagmaster at Eton, and Mentor in life, was the grandson of the great saddler with whom Sir John and his predecessors had dealt for ages. The Durants, who were French by origin, had made a great deal of money in that business, and one of the sons had been made a clergyman. This was the father of Lewis, who had been brought up accordingly in as much luxury as his friend; but unfortunate speculations on his father’s part had changed all that by this time, and the young man was now fighting his way at the Bar, with very little to keep up the warfare on, and none of those supports of good connection which help the aristocratic poor to keep their heads above water. He had a home in the depths of one of the Midland counties, where the Rector--once able to hold his own with the best of his country neighbours, and considered a very good sort of man--had fallen to the ordinary parsonic level, without any standing ground beyond it, and not much right to high consideration on that ground. For the Rev. Mr. Durant was not a very good clergyman. It had not been the object of his life to become so; but rather to obliterate from all minds by his luxurious living, his carriages, his conservatories, his expenditure in every way, that he was the son of the well-known saddler; as it has been that saddler’s object to advance his son in life and make him a member of the upper class by making him a clergyman. Everybody was quite conscious of this while he was rich; but, naturally, everybody became still more conscious of it when he became poor; and as his wealth had been his chief standing ground, and he had not much worth or goodness, and no activity, to gain him credit in his parish, the downfall was pretty nearly complete. And the woman whom he had married had been no more than a fit partner for such a man; so that when Lewis, their only child, became old enough to think of home as anything more than a jolly place to spend holidays in, the boy’s refined and delicate mind had suffered a severe shock. How it was that he happened to possess a refined and