It would be untrue to say that Paul Seaton's vaulting ambition "o'er-leaped itself and tumbled down on t'other." It did nothing of the kind. It raised him to the respected elevation of the high-table, and bade him feast and make merry above the salt; but as to those rose-tinted mountain-tops, which he had beheld in the light of dawn, and which he had then fondly imagined he was going to scale--well, they were practically as far above the high-table as they were above the ground. The tide which Paul Seaton had taken at the flood and which had therefore led him on to fortune, in due season began to ebb: the reforms, on which he had spent his enthusiastic youth, had either materialised into the impedimenta of practical politics, or else had faded into the mist of forgotten dreams: younger men with newer schemes hurried past him along the road which seemed to lead to the mountain-tops; and he sat still and watched them go by, wishing them God-speed with all his heart, since he also had passed that way: yet knowing all the time that they too, in their turn, would watch the rose-colour fade from those peaks which were inaccessible to the foot of man. So he who had marched to battle with the vanguard stayed at home by the stuff, and occupied himself in safeguarding those institutions which he had once fondly hoped to sweep away. From a dangerously daring pioneer he had developed into a steady and unswerving follower. He was therefore chosen as one of the new peers whose creation lends glory to a Coronation; and he strove as conscientiously to keep back his Party in the Lords as he had once striven to urge it forward in the Commons. As for his wife, I could not judge her as dispassionately as I judged him, since I knew her so much better. She was considerably older than I, and I adored her in the days when she was a grown-up young lady, and I a shy and awkward schoolboy. She was an orphan and lived with her uncle, Sir Benjamin Farley: and Sir Benjamin and my father were old and fast friends. When I was about fourteen I made up my mind that when I grew up I would marry the exact counterpart of Isabel Carnaby, as Mrs. Paul Seaton was called in that prehistoric time: and after I became a man and she a married woman, she still ranked among my most admired friends. Of late years I had not seen much of her, she being a busy woman and I an idle man; but we kept a book-marker in the volume of our friendship, and always began again exactly where we left off. She changed outwardly very little, and inwardly not at all. She was the same woman as Mrs. Seaton that she had been as Isabel Carnaby, and the same as Lady Chayford that she had been as Mrs. Seaton.