The streets were filled with flying equipages, and the mansions were ablaze, the sidewalks held few pedestrians, and as Leacraft sorrowfully moved through the stately purlieus, music swept out from open windows or swinging doors. Often he paused and watched the descending occupants of the carriages; they were entrancing women and peerless men, their laughter was silvery and undismayed, unchecked by tears. Could it be possible that these inner esoteric circles of London high life and unimaginable wealth indulged in revelry; could not the crash and fall of empires turn the votaries of gayety to soberer thoughts, or stifle the intoxicating voice of pleasure? Leacraft wondered, and the weariness of a great suspense weighed him down; the ingrained Puritanism of his nature raged against this heartlessness, this indecent bravado, a mockery of joy, where all should be shadowed with the sighs of penitence and supplication. Leacraft was bitterly offended at this apparent heartlessness; it startled him beyond the limits of endurance; he looked for some representative of this foolish life, upon whom to turn with rebuke and denunciation. Leacraft wandered on in a disconsolate mood, and the growing indications, with the falling night, that the fashionable world of London was engaged, in a preconcerted way, to spend the last hours of its metropolitan sojourn in a spendthrift vortex of excitement and conviviality moved him to muttered objurgations. He had slipped past Hyde Park Corners, past the Apsley House, and had glided with hastening steps, as his passion of revolt, at this unseemly loss of self-respect, rose to a towering indignation, into Grosvenor Square. He stood facing the long facade, where in repetitive elegance, with columned porches and mansard roofs, and wall-like chimneys, the mansions of the very rich, illumined at all their windows, poured forth a torrent of light. Aggrieved and stupefied, he shot into Berkley Square, and still no interruption to the aspect of mad revelry. Could it be a frenzied spasm of indulgence, before separation forever from the bliss of the West End, that terrestrial paradise of swelldom and financial and social glory? He wondered. And thus wondering, he came to Devonshire House, fronting Piccadilly. The comfortable home, with its small brick work, peeking chimney pots, the low entablature and triple doors behind the iron gateway, and the unbroken watch of the woman-headed sphinxes, on either side of the elevated escutcheon of the Kingdom, was there, encompassed by its imprisoning walls--and here, too, the effrontery of lavish gayety assaulted his eyes. The gates were flung wide open, powdered footmen were ranged before the doors, arriving and departing carriages threaded Piccadilly with conscienceless celerity, music uttered its delicious melodies, and in them was no requiem note, no throb of sorrow, and the guests crowding into its dazzling halls seemed untouched by thoughts less careless