Cutbill read him thoroughly; but though Lord Culdufif saw this, it did not prevent him trying all his little pretty devices of pleasing on the man of culverts and cuttings. In fact, he seemed to feel that though he could not bring down the bird, it was better not to spoil his gun by a change of cartridge, and so he fired away his usual little pleasantries, well aware that none of them were successful. He had now been three days with the Bramleighs, and certainly had won the suffrages, though in different degrees, of them all. He had put himself so frankly and unreservedly in Colonel Bramleigh's hands about the coal-mine, candidly confessing the whole thing was new to him, he was a child in money matters, that the banker was positively delighted with him. With Augustus he had talked politics confidentially,--not questions of policy nor statecraft, not matters of legislation or government, but the more subtle and ingenious points as to what party a young man entering life ought to join, what set he should attach himself to, and what line he should take to insure future distinction and office. He was well up in the gossip of the House, and knew who was disgusted with such an one, and why So-and-so “would n't stand it” any longer. To Temple Bramleigh he was charming. Of the “line,” as they love to call it, he knew positively everything. Nor was it merely how this or that legation was conducted, how this man got on with his chief, or why that other had asked to be transferred; but he knew all the mysterious goings-on of that wonderful old repository they call “the Office.” “That's what you must look to, Bramleigh,” he would say, clapping him on the shoulder. “The men who make plenipos and envoys are not in the Cabinet, nor do they dine at Osborne; they are fellows in seedy black, with brown umbrellas, who cross the Green Park every morning about eleven o'clock, and come back over the self-same track by six of an evening. Staid old dogs, with crape on their hats, and hard lines round their mouths, fond of fresh caviare from Russia, and much given to cursing the messengers.” He was, in a word, the incarnation of a very well-bred selfishness, that had learned how much it redounds to a man's personal comfort that he is popular, and that even a weak swimmer who goes with the tide makes a better figure than the strongest and bravest who attempts to stem the current. He was, in his way, a keen observer; and a certain haughty tone, a kind of self-assertion, in Marion's manner, so distinguished her from her sister, that he set Cutbill to ascertain if it had any other foundation than mere temperament; and the wily agent was not long in learning that a legacy of twenty thousand pounds in her own absolute right from her mother's side accounted for these pretensions. “I tell you, Cutty, it 's only an old diplomatist like myself would have detected the share that bank debentures had in that girl's demeanor. Confess, sir, it was a clever hit.”