As he went out of the vestibule into the street, he passed a tall, very good-looking young man who was about to enter, and who nodded to him familiarly as one brother may nod to another. Hurstmanceaux said a curt good-day without a smile. The other man passed in without the preliminary of enquiring whether the lady of the house was at home, and the footman of the antechamber took off his great coat and laid his hat and cane on the table as a matter of course: a person who had known no better might have concluded that the visitor was Kenilworth himself. But to Kenny, as they called him behind his back, the anteroom lackeys were much less attentive than they were to this young man. “My real brother-in-law,” said Hurstmanceaux to himself, with a vexed frown upon his brows and a little laugh which people would have called cynical upon his lips. He did not love Kenilworth, but young Lord Brancepeth he abhorred. CHAPTER VI. “I met the Miser: how has he been to-day? Rating you, eh?” said Lord Brancepeth when he had been ten minutes or more ensconced in the cosiest corner by the boudoir fire. He was a very well-featured and well-built young man, with a dark oval face, pensive brows, and great dreamy dark brown eyes; his physiognomy, which was poetic and melancholy, did not accord with his conversation, which was slipshod and slangy, or his life which was idiotic, after the manner of his generation. Mouse was standing behind him leaning over his shoulder to look at an ancient British coin newly attached to his watch-chain; her own eyes were soft with a fullness of admiration which would have been doubtless delightful to him if he had not been so terribly used to it. “The Miser was out of humor as usual,” she replied; “Ronald should really live amongst some primitive sect of Shakers or Quakers, or Ranters or Roarers, whatever they are called: he has all the early Christian virtues, and he thinks nobody should live upon credit.” “He certainly shouldn’t live amongst us,” said Brancepeth, with a self-satisfied laugh, as if chronic debt were a source of especial felicitation. “How he hates me, by the way, Mousie.” “You are not a primitive virtue,” said his friend, with her hands lying lightly on his shoulders, and her breath stirring like a soft balmy south wind amongst his close curling dark hair. Brancepeth had ceased to be a worshipper: and he had ceased even to like being the worshipped, but habit is second nature, and it was his habit to be wherever Lady Kenilworth was, and that kind of habit becomes second nature to lazy and good-hearted men.