"OH, MY COUSIN, SHALLOW-HEARTED!" Roland Lansdell dined with his uncle and cousin at Lowlands upon the day after the picnic; but he said very little about his afternoon ramble in Hurstonleigh Grove. He lounged upon the lawn with his cousin Gwendoline, and played with the dogs, and stared at the old pictures in the long dreary billiard-room, where the rattle of the rolling balls had been unheard for ages; and he entered into a languid little political discussion with Lord Ruysdale, and broke off--or rather dropped out of it--in the middle with a yawn, declaring that he knew very little about the matter, and was no doubt making a confounded idiot of himself, and would his uncle kindly excuse him, and reserve his admirable arguments for some one better qualified to appreciate them? The young man had no political enthusiasm. He had been in the great arena, and had done his little bit of wrestling, and had found himself baffled, not by the force of his adversaries, but by the _vis inerticæ_ of things in general. Eight or nine years ago Roland Lansdell had been very much in earnest,--too much in earnest, perhaps,--for he had been like a racehorse that goes off with a rush and makes running for all the other horses, and then breaks down ignominiously midway betwixt the starting-post and the judge's chair. There was no "stay" in this bright young creature. If the prizes of life could have been won by that fiery rush, he would have won them; but as it was, he was fain to fall back among the ranks nameless, and let the plodders rush on towards the golden goal. Thus it was that Roland Lansdell had been a kind of failure and disappointment. He had begun so brilliantly, he had promised so much. "If this young man is so brilliant at one-and-twenty," people had said to one another, "what will he be by the time he is forty-five?" But at thirty Roland was nothing. He had dropped out of public life altogether, and was only a drawing-room favourite; a lounger in gay Continental cities; a drowsy idler in fair Grecian islands; a scribbler of hazy little verses about pretty women, and veils, and fans, and daggers, and jealous husbands, and moonlit balconies, and withered orange-flowers, and poisoned chalices, and midnight revels, and despair; a beautiful useless, purposeless creature; a mark for manoeuvring mothers; a hero for sentimental young ladies,--altogether a mockery, a delusion, and a snare.