She saw him as he lounged against the rails that bright June evening, and greeted him with a condescending little gesture of her head,--adorned with Madame Ode's last madness in the shape of a bonnet,--and then the barouche rolled by and she was gone. The carriages were growing thin. It was scarcely likely that she could return, for it was close upon her father's dinner-hour. Poor Philip wondered what party she was going to--with whom she would dance. He fancied her smiling destruction upon the gilded youth of Tyburnia and Belgravia. He thought of those charmed circles in which she was as remote from him as if she had gone to parties in the Pleiades; and then, as he crossed the park on his pilgrimage northwards, he set his strong white teeth together fiercely, and muttered: "I _will_ succeed!" It was not to have his name inscribed upon the mighty roll where blaze the names of Raffaelle and Correggio that the young man aspired with such a passionate yearning, but to have an _entrée_ in the West-end mansions where Florence Crawford was to be met. CHAPTER II. LORD ASPENDELL'S DAUGHTER. When the brilliant stream of carriages had poured out of Apsley Gate; when the Serpentine blushed redly in the low western sunlight; when the fashionable world had gone homeward in barouches and landaus, britzskas and phaetons, to dash through the dusky park two hours hence in tiny miniature broughams, with lamps that flash like meteors through the night; when a solemn twilight calm had come down upon the dusky greensward, and the tinkling of a sheep-bell made a rustic sound in the stillness; when a town-bred Gray might have sat beside the placid water meditating an elegy in a West-end park,--a lumbering old chariot was very often to be seen creeping up and down the Lady's Mile. It was a shabby old carriage, with a ponderous drab hammer-cloth which the moths had eaten away in bare patches here and there, a faded old carriage which might have been bright and splendid long ago, when lovely Margaret, Countess of Blessington, was to be seen in the Lady's Mile, and genial Lord Palmerston was called Cupid. But now in the still gloaming this dismal equipage might have been mistaken for some phantom chariot haunting the scene of departed glories. The pale face looking out at the window would have assisted the delusion, so lifeless was its changeless calm--a beautiful, melancholy, patrician face. You might have fancied you beheld the unreal image of a forgotten belle, a ghost of beauty gliding in her shadowy chariot beneath the spreading branches which had looked down upon her triumphs years and years ago.