Cocky was a very old child at the time of his marriage; he was thirty-seven years of age, with his thin, fair hair turning very grey, and one lung nearly gone as he had declared; but he did not evince the slightest desire to reform, and he took money in all ways, good, bad, and indifferent, in which it offered itself to him. “What a man to leave behind one!” thought Otterbourne very often, with real shame and sorrow at his heart. He was himself a very good man, and a gentleman to the marrow of his bones; his vanities were harmless, and his little airs of youth were not ridiculous because he was still very handsome and well preserved. By what horrible fatality, he often asked himself, was Cocky the heir of his dukedom? He had three other sons, all men of admirable conduct and health, both moral and physical. By what extraordinary irony and brutality of fate had his eldest son, who had enjoyed every possible benefit from early training and good influences, become what he was? His wife had been a saint, and, for the first ten years of his life Cocky had been as pretty and promising a boy as ever rejoiced the heart of parents. She had given birth to the four charming little children whose names were recorded in Burke, and who were admired by all the women they met when they toddled along the sunny side of the Park, or drove in their basket carriage behind their two sleek donkeys with Jack holding the reins and a groom walking at the asses’ heads. They were pretty babies, dear little men and women, with big black eyes and golden masses of hair, and skins as soft and as fair as blush-roses; she was fond of them but they could not have much space in her life, it had been already so very full when they had come into it. She had never a moment to herself unless it were the time of meditation which her bath gave her, or the minutes in which, alone in her little brougham, she rushed from one house to another. Cocky went about with his wife quite often enough to set a good example. Not into society indeed, Cocky had a society of his own to which he was faithful, but he was always there when wanted--in the London house, in the country houses, in the Paris hotel, at the German bath--he was always there in the background, a shadowy presence letting himself in and out with noiseless and discreet footsteps, a permanent sanction and indisputable guarantee that all was as it should be, and that Lady Kenilworth, with the big diamond of his House on her fair bosom, could attend a Drawing-room or a State ball whenever she chose. He really kept his part of the compact with a loyalty which better men might have not shown, for better men would not have had his inducements or his patience to do so.