Maude was very extravagant; but then how could she well be otherwise? Her appreciation of “pounds” was very little above that of Mr. Harold Skimpole. She very rarely had any money; if she wanted shillings, she borrowed them--by the handful--of the housekeeper at the Cedars. But, on the other hand, she had unlimited credit almost everywhere. A beggar, or one of the churchwardens of Isleworth, armed with a plate after a charity-sermon, were about the only persons who ever demanded ready money from her. She had a vague idea that there was no limit to her father’s wealth, and that she was to have as much of it as she required for her own uses whenever she married, if he approved of her marriage; and if he did not approve, she would not have the money, and would be poor, and live in a pretty cottage somewhere in the neighbourhood of St. John’s Wood, without so much as a pair of ponies to drive in the Park. She looked forward very vaguely to this sort of thing, always believing that the most indulgent of fathers would come by-and-by to smile upon the penniless Harcourt Lowther, and that everything would end happily, as it does in a comedy. She sighed now and then, and told her confidante, Julia, that she was the most miserable of creatures when she thought of poor dear Harcourt slaving himself to death in that dreadful Van Diemen’s Land; but, on the whole, she bore her separation from her affianced lover with considerable resignation. Was she not by nature a bright and hopeful creature? and had she not from babyhood inhabited a kind of fairy circle, separated from all the common outer world by a golden boundary, sheltered from every rude breath of heaven by a limitless canopy of banknotes? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VIII. AT THE CHÂTEAU DE BOURBON.