It was a rare event for M. de la Bourbonais to dine at Dullerton Court; he disliked accepting its grand-seignior hospitality, and whenever he consented it was understood there should be nobody to meet him. “I have grown as unsocial as a bear from long habit, mon cher,” he would be sure to say every time Sir Simon bore down on him with an invitation. “I shall turn into a mollusk by-and-by. How completely we are the creatures of habit!” To which Sir Simon would invariably reply with his Johnsonian maxim: “You should struggle against that sort of thing, Bourbonais, and overcome it”; and Raymond would smile, and agree with him. He was too gentle and too thoroughbred to taunt his friend with not following it himself, which he might have done with bitter truth. Sir Simon was the slave of habits and of weaknesses that it was far more necessary to struggle against than Raymond’s harmless little foibles. There are some men who spend one-half of their lives in cheating others, and the other half in trying to cheat themselves. Sir Simon Harness was one of these. Cheating is perhaps a hard word to apply to his efforts to keep up a delusion which had grown so entirely his master that he could scarcely see where the substance ended and where the shadow began. Yet his whole life at present was a cheat. He had the reputation of being the largest land-owner and the wealthiest man in that end of the county, and he was, in reality, one of the poorest. The grand aim of his existence was to live up to this false appearance, and prevent the truth from coming out. It would be a difficult and useless undertaking to examine how far he was originally to blame for the state of active falsehood into which he and his circumstances had fallen. There is no doubt that his father was to blame in the first instance. He had been a very splendid old gentleman, Sir Alexander Harness, and had lived splendidly and died heavily in debt, leaving the estate considerably mortgaged. He had not been more than twenty years dead at the time I speak of, so that his son, in coming into possession, found himself saddled with the paternal debts, and with the confirmed extravagant habits of a lifetime. This made the sacrifices which the payment of those debts necessitated seem a matter of simple impossibility to him. The only thing to be done was to let the Court for a term of years, send away the troops of misnamed servants that encumbered the place, sell off the stud, and betake himself to the Continent and economize. Thus he would have paid off his encumbrances, and come back independent and easy in his mind. But, unluckily, strong measures of this sort did not lie at all in Sir Simon’s way. He talked about going abroad, and had some indefinite notion of “pulling in.” He did run off to Paris and other continental places very frequently; but as he travelled with a courier and a valet, and with all the expenses inseparable from those adjuncts, the excursions did not contribute much