Lord Sandilands had not succeeded early in life to his old title and respectable but not magnificent estates. The Honourable John Borlase was much more clever, agreeable, and fascinating than rich, when, having left the University of Oxford after a very creditable career, he began to lead the kind of life which is ordinarily led by young men who have only to wait for fortune and title, and who possess sufficient means to fill up the interval comfortably, and sufficient intellect to occupy it with tolerable rationality. The dilettanteism which was one of Lord Sandilands' characteristics developed itself later in life; while he was a young man, his tastes were more active, and he had devoted himself to sporting and travel. In the pursuit of the first he had made Mark Challoner's acquaintance; and the _camaraderie_ of the hunting-field had strengthened into a strong and congenial tie of friendship, which had been broken only by the Squire's death. In the pursuit of the second, John Borlase had encountered many adventures, and made more than one acquaintance destined to influence his future, either sensibly or insensibly; and among the many was one with whom we have to do, for a brief interval of retrospection. John Borlase did not affect "Bohemianism" (the phrase had not then been invented, but the thing existed); but he liked character, and he liked Art,--liked it better than he understood it, selected the society of those who knew more about it than he did; and though he by no means restricted himself to the society of artists, he certainly frequented them more than any other class. It was at Berlin that he fell in with Etienne Gautier, an eccentric and very clever Frenchman, exiled by the cruelty of fortune from his native paradise, Paris, and employed by the French Government in some mysterious commission connected with the Galleries of Painting and Sculpture at Berlin,--a city which he never ceased to depreciate, but where he nevertheless appeared to enjoy himself thoroughly. Etienne Gautier was a dark, active, restless man; vivacious of speech; highly informed on all matters appertaining to Art; a liberal in politics and religion--of a degree of liberalism very unusual at that period, though it would not be regarded as particularly "advanced" at present; an oddity in his manners; evidently in poor circumstances, which he treated with that perfect absence of disguise and affectation which is so difficult for English people to comprehend, so impossible for them to imitate; and devotedly, though injudiciously, attached to his beautiful daughter, Gertrude. The girl's mother, an Englishwoman, had died at her birth, and her father had brought her up after a completely unconventional fashion, and one which would have horrified his own countrymen in particular. She was allowed as much freedom as "bird on branch," and her education was of the most desultory description. Gertrude Gautier