The Honourable himself was a pleasant but dissipated-looking youth of about two-and-twenty. His stature was small, and his attainments, beyond those indigenous to every well-born and well-bred young Englishman, insignificant; but his appreciation of the pleasures of life was great. He was a good specimen of that type of young man but for whom chorus-girls would be compelled to pay for their own diamonds. Pending the arrival of the time when he would be called upon to assume the office of an hereditary legislator, he was engaged in what he called "seeing life." He did not see much, though he thought he did, for his field of vision was limited; but what he saw he saw thoroughly. He entertained a great admiration for Captain Lottingar, whom he had encountered at a flashy club in town; and any fleeting doubts, derived from the hints of experienced and officious friends, which he might have entertained as to the genuineness of that warrior's pretensions to gentility were at once set at rest when he arrived, in response to a pressing invitation, on a visit to "my old place in Hertfordshire." A ripening friendship with the Principal Boy was now turning his admiration for the name of Lottingar into positive infatuation; and altogether the Honourable Reginald Fitznorton was in that condition usually described as "ready for plucking." Pip, who did not as a rule concern himself overmuch with his neighbours' affairs, soon became conscious of a distinct feeling of curiosity in regard to his present surroundings. Captain Lottingar one day mentioned to the Honourable in his hearing that the family of Lottingar had inhabited Broadoak Manor, without intermission, from the days of Queen Elizabeth,--a statement which Pip found rather hard to reconcile with the fact that there lay in the garage at the back of the house a notice-board, showing every sign of having been recently uprooted from the grassplot by the front gate, inscribed with the simple legend "TO LET." Moreover, one afternoon, while exploring the numerous passages in the house in search of the Principal Boy's fox-terrier, which he had been bidden to catch and wash, Pip made the discovery that, with the exception of the dining-room, library, kitchens, hall and a few bedrooms, Broadoak Manor was a warren of empty rooms destitute of furniture, though a few of the more conspicuous windows were furnished with curtains.