Barney’s people were naturally very proud of him. His father had always admired him with the intense admiration which a very little man has for a very big relative; his mother referred to him as, “My son, Barnard Hope, the celebrated painter.” To all appearances Barney was a man greatly to be envied, but, alas! how little does the public know the inner life of even its greatest favourite! All may be fair to outward view, while within sits brooding care. Barney had a secret trouble which he confided to no one, and it caused him serious mental dissatisfaction. He had told Edna Sartwell that she had blighted his life, and he fully believed this at the time he made the gloomy statement. He sombrely pictured himself in the future as a disappointed man--successful, perhaps, but cynically bitter with existence, living the life of a recluse, and cherishing his broken heart. As the victim of a hopeless passion, he pitied himself, and yet took a melancholy pleasure in ruminating over the wreck of what might have been a joyful career. To his dismay he found it impossible to live up to his ideal. The forced laugh; the pessimistic smile; the dark mantle of a great reserve which he hoped to fold around himself, did not come natural to him, and he was continually backsliding into being his own hilarious boisterous self, and having a good time, when he should have been moping alone over an aching void. Above all things he expected himself to forswear ladies’ society, and never again indulge in the light, flippant, and complimentary talk in which he had been an acknowledged master; but it grieved him to discover that he still took a keen delight in their presence, while they, poor dears! unblushingly adored Barney as they had always done. His arrival in any room immediately brightened the occasion, and he was by all odds the most popular young man in his set. His failure in the tragic _rôle_ he had marked out for himself at first worried Barney, and led him to suspect that he was not so deep as he had imagined; but this disquieting thought gave way under his ultimate realization that the taciturn recluse of fiction and the drama was merely a melancholy humbug who did not exist in real life. This comforting discovery did much to place Barney once more on good terms with himself, and by-and-by he abandoned the attempt to pose as a stricken victim of woman’s inappreciation, and was once more the genial host and the welcome guest.