"I'm uncommonly glad you have made up your mind to come to town," wrote Lord Sandilands to Miles Challoner; "it is the best thing you can do; and so far from being disrespectful to your father's memory, it is your best way of avoiding what might even appear disrespectful to those who are no doubt watching you pretty closely. You have not a taste for the things the Squire (God bless him!) delighted in, and you cannot affect to have; because, in the first place, it is not in you to affect, and, in the second, you would certainly be found out by Mr. Styles. (Ceres and Pomona! shall I ever forget a dialogue between your father and him about the best crop for the Bayhamsfields?) You will offend your new people much less by absence than by indifference, depend upon it. Then you can thoroughly depend on Styles; and you can always put agricultural enthusiasm on paper. So come up, my dear boy; and the sooner the better." Miles Challoner went to London, and very soon after he arrived there "time" began "to tell." CHAPTER III. Carabas House. Carabas House is in Beaumanoir-square, as most people know. Long before the smart stuccoed residences--with their plate-glass windows, their conservatoried balconies, their roomy porticoes--sprung up, like Aladdin's palaces, at the command of the great wizard-builder, Compo, who so recently died a baronet and a millionaire; when the ground on which Beaumanoir-square now stands was a dreary swamp, across which our great-grandmothers, in fear of their lives, were carried to Ranelagh, Carabas House stood, a big, rambling, red-bricked mansion, surrounded on all sides by a high wall, and looking something between a workhouse, a lunatic asylum, and a gaol. To the Marquis of Carabas of those days it mattered little what was the aspect of his ancestral home, as he, from the time of his succession, had resolutely declined to see it, or any other part of the domain whence his title and estates were derived, preferring to spend his life on the Continent of Europe, in the society of agreeable men and women, and in the acquisition of a splendid collection of pictures, statues, and other _objets d'art_, which at his lordship's lamented demise were sold in Paris at a world-famous sale extending over many days, the pecuniary result of which was hailed with the greatest satisfaction by his lordship's heir. For Mr. Purrington, his lordship's cousin, who succeeded to the title and estates, wanted money very badly indeed, he had been speculating for a very long time on the chances of his succession, and he had to pay very dearly for these speculations. He had contested his county in the Tory interest four separate times, at a cost known only to himself, his wife, and his head-agent. He had married the daughter of an Irish peer; a lovely woman full of talent, affectionate, loyal, energetic, and thoroughly understanding her position as--a county member's wife, but with a number of impecunious