Miss Grunderson will drop in upon her friend, to discuss my bearish behaviour, on the earliest opportunity. Nothing impresses a sentimental young person so favourably as downright rudeness. The heroine in a lady’s novel always adores the man who snubs her.” Thus argued the diplomatist by profession, strolling Strand-wards in the starlight; while the diplomatist by organization listened quietly, and thought his own thoughts as regarded this grand conquest, of which his kinsman was so proud. Harcourt Lowther was not apt to resent the insolent _insouciance_, the calm assurance of superiority, with which his senior treated him, and indeed had treated him from that early boyhood in which the lads had played together at Eton. But the wrongs that rankle deeply in a man’s breast are sometimes those which he endures silently. Harcourt believed that his own prospects had been sacrificed to the advancement of Roderick; and he was not sorry when the elder son went wild, and turned his back as coolly upon his father as if he had never been the pampered favourite of weak love, the all-absorbing drain upon a limited income. In every way Roderick had fared better than his brother. Lowther Hall, surrounded by park and farm-lands that constituted an estate of some three hundred acres, might not be worth very much to a man of large ideas and lofty inspirations; but whatever it was worth, it was tightly entailed upon the heir of the Lowthers, and not so much as a game-keeper’s cottage or a scrap of meadow-land was reserved for the luckless junior. Mrs. Lowther had been mistress of a small fortune, but that had been spent on the education of the two young men,--Harcourt in this matter, as in all others, going to the wall; for his University career had been cut short in order that his brother’s debts might be paid, and that extravagant gentleman be enabled to face the big-wigs of his college without fear of clamorous creditors, and read at leisure for a degree which he was too lazy to succeed in getting. After this Harcourt’s prospects had again been sacrificed, and the young barrister, unable to live at the bar, had been fain to accept an ensign’s commission; while Roderick, pushed into the diplomatic world by a desperate effort of family interest, exhibited his handsome face at the Prussian Court, and squandered every farthing that he could screw out of his father’s slender purse. When the purse had become as empty as it well could, there had been the usual remonstrances, the usual bad feeling which is likely to arise between an utterly selfish and unprincipled young man and the father who is no longer able to be of any use to him, and who takes the liberty of resenting the extravagance which has involved his later life in difficulties.