The finger of Mephistopheles, always pointing, generally contrived to touch a sore place. Francis Tredethlyn, even when he had been happiest in the sunlight of Maude’s smiles, had felt a vague sense of that one bitter truth. She was no nearer to him than of old. The impassable gulf still yawned between them, not to be bridged over by pretty little courtesies or patronizing smiles. But in spite of all inward misgivings, Mr. Tredethlyn turned upon his friend, and hotly denied the truth of that gentleman’s observations. Harcourt Lowther was quite resigned to a little fiery contradiction of this kind. The arrow went home to the mark it had been shot at, and rankled there. Such discussions were very frequent between the two men; and however firmly Francis might argue with his friend in the daytime, he was apt to lie awake in the dead of the night, like false cousin Amy in the poem, when the rain was pattering on the roofs of the palatial district, and wonder, with a dull, aching pain in his heart, whether Harcourt Lowther was right after all; and Maude--sunny-haired, beautiful, frivolous Maude--would never be any nearer and dearer to him than she was now. In the meantime, Mr. Lowther, who sowed the seeds of the disease, was always ready with the remedy; and the remedy was--dissipation. Harcourt Lowther, in whose few years of legal study had been crammed the vicious experiences of a lifetime, was eager to perform the promise he had made to Francis Tredethlyn some two years before, when the young man first received the tidings of his uncle Oliver’s bequest. “I told you I’d show you life, dear boy,” he said; “and I mean to keep my word. While Mrs. Tredethlyn amuses herself with the usual social treadmill business--perpetually moving on, and never getting any farther--you and I will see a world in which life is worth living.” Thus it was that Francis Tredethlyn was lured away from a home in which he was taught to believe himself unappreciated, and introduced for the first time within the unholy precincts of the kingdom of Bohemia. He entered the mysterious regions at first very reluctantly. He had the ignorant rustic’s notion of Vice, and fancied that she would show herself in naked hideousness; but he found her with her natural face hidden under a plaster mask modelled from the fair countenance of Virtue. It was something of a caricature, perhaps; for all imitations are so apt to become exaggerations. He found that Bohemia was a kind of Belgravia in electro-plate. There were the same dresses and properties, only a little tarnished and faded; the same effects, always considerably overdone; the same jargon, but louder and coarser. Life in Bohemia seemed like a Transpontine version of a West-end drama, with cheaper scenery and actors, and a more uproarious audience.