The irony of the malevolent and the vulgar; the gossip and surmises of the anonymous press; the "Honourable" cut from Audley's name in the Army List, the Peerage, and elsewhere, and from that of his daughter Gartha, who was just about to be brought out, and had begun to anticipate, with all a young beauty's pleasure, the glories of her first presentation at Court, were all before him now. To have felt, enjoyed, and to lose all the sweets of rank, of wealth, of power, and patronage; the worship of the empty world, the slavish snobbery of trade, to have been congratulated by all the begowned and bewigged members of the Inns of Court, and by all his tenantry, for nothing--all this proved too much for Downie's brain, and certainly too much for his heart. It was intolerable. He thought of his cold, unimpressionable, pale-faced, and aristocratic wife deprived of her place (not of rank, for she was a peer's daughter), through that "Canadian connection" of Richard's, as they were wont to term poor Constance--an issue to be tried at the bar, every legal celebrity of the day perhaps retained in the cause; money wasted, bets made, and speculation rife; himself eventually shut out from a sphere in which he had begun to figure, and to figure well! Would, he thought, that the sea had swallowed up Braddon, even as it had done his master! Would that some Afghan bullet might lay low this upstart lad, this Denzil Devereaux, and then his claims and papers might be laughed to scorn! Downie had never been without a secret dread of hearing more of Constance and her marriage, and that one day or other it might admit of legal proof, and now the dread was close and palpable. He cherished a dire vengeance against his dead brother, for what he deemed his duplicity in contracting such a marriage, unknown to all; and in his unjust ire forgot their late uncle's insane family pride, which was the real cause of all that had occurred. Novelists, dramatists, and humourists, are usually severe upon the legal profession; yet in our narrative, Downie and his agent Sharkley are given but as types of a bad class of men. Far be it from us to think evil generally of that vast body from whose ranks have sprung so many brilliant orators, statesmen, and writers, especially in England; though Lord Brougham, in his Autobiography, designates the law as "the cursedest of all cursed professions," and even Sir Walter Scott, a member of the Scottish College of Justice, where the practice is loose, often barbarous and antiquated, wrote in his personal memoirs, that he liked it little at first, and it pleased God to make that little less upon further acquaintance; for the spirit and chicanery of the profession are liable to develop to the full that which the Irish, not inaptly, term "the black drop" which is in so many human hearts.