As yet, he had, in his own ambitious sense of the words, failed to buy them. He remained one of the obscure rich, who are unknown to fame and to princes. It was not for lack of expenditure that he had hitherto failed to gratify his social ambitions. He had not understood how to set about the matter; he had been timid and awkward; his wife had been a drag on him, and his daughter, on whom he had counted for the best of assistance, had declined to accept the office which he assigned to her. He had lost time, missed occasions, failed to advance to his goal in a manner which intensely irritated a man who had never before this been foiled or baulked in any of his plans. He had learned that the great world was not a drinking den, to be entered by “bluff,” with a nugget in one hand and a revolver in the other; and in this stage of chagrin and disappointment, Lady Kenilworth held out her hand to him. He had done all that he knew how to do. He had been returned for a metropolitan division and elected to the Carlton. He and his wife had been presented at Court almost as soon as they had arrived in England. They had been invited to a few political houses. They had gone where everybody went in summer, winter, spring, and autumn. His subscriptions were many and large. His financial value was recognized by Conservative leaders. But there he remained. He was an outsider, and in this period of perplexity, disappointment, and futile aspirations to the “smart world,” Lady Kenilworth, the high priestess of smartness, held out her hand to him. CHAPTER IV. Lady Kenilworth was the prettiest woman in England; her family, the Courcys of Faldon, was renowned for physical charms, and she was the loveliest of them all, exactly reproducing a famous Romney which portrayed the features of her great great grandmother. She had eyes like forget-me-nots, a brilliantly fair skin, a purely classic profile, a mass of sunny shining hair, which needed no arts to brighten or to ripple it, and a carriage, which for airy grace and supreme distinction, had its equal nowhere among her contemporaries. Her baptismal name of Clare had been almost entirely abandoned by her relatives and friends, and she was always called by them Mouse, a nickname given her in nursery days when she pillaged her elder sisters’ bonbons and made raids on the early strawberry beds, and which had gained in the course of time many variations, such as Sourisette, Petit Rat, Topinetta, Fine-ears, Liebe Mus, and any other derivative which came to the lips of her associates.