making the mental reflexion that from such a worthy’s son at least the biggest cad in London could not have deserved less consideration. He had worked himself round to allowances, to interpretations, to such hypotheses as the evidence in the _Times_, read in the British Museum on that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon, did not exclude. Though they had been frequent enough, and too frequent, his hours of hot resentment against the man who had attached to him the stigma he was to carry for ever, he threw himself, in other conditions and with a certain success, into the effort to find filial condonations and excuses. It was comparatively easy for him to accept himself as the son of a terribly light Frenchwoman; there seemed a deeper obloquy even than that in his having for his other parent a nobleman altogether wanting in nobleness. He was absolutely too poor to afford it. Sometimes, in imagination, he sacrificed one of the authors of his being to the other, throwing over Lord Frederick much the oftener; sometimes, when the theory failed that his father would have done great things for him if he had lived, or the assumption broke down that he had been Florentine Vivier’s only lover, he cursed and disowned them alike; sometimes he arrived at conceptions which presented them side by side, looking at him with eyes infinitely sad but quite unashamed—eyes that seemed to tell him they had been surpassingly unfortunate but had not been base. Of course his worst moments now, as they had always been the worst, were those in which his grounds for holding that Lord Frederick had really been his father viciously fell away from him. It must be added that they always passed off, since the mixture in his tormenting, his incorrigible pulses could be accounted for by no other dream.