‘Who else could I mean?’ said Frank, calmly;--‘there was no other girl there. But, Laurie, really you ought to mind what you are about. We may have come down in the world, you know, and seen better days, and all that; but we need not fall quite out of the habits of gentlemen all the same.’ ‘Am I falling out of the habits, &c.?’ said Laurie, laughing. ‘I am only a poor painter, my dear fellow. I am not a swell and a Guardsman like you.’ ‘I shan’t be a Guardsman a minute longer than I can help it, and you know that,’ said Frank, with a little indignation; ‘but I hope I shall never see a girl like that come into a room without treating her with proper respect.’ ‘Proper respect!’ cried Laurie, much mystified; and then he laughed. ‘Alice is only a child,’ he said. ‘I have known her since she was that height. She thinks me a kind of old uncle, or godfather, or something. Yes, of course, she plays charmingly,--but she is only a child all the same.’ ‘A child! she is sixteen,’ said Frank; ‘and lovely, I think. I don’t know the family, of course; they are your friends; but a young lady like Miss Severn is generally considered entitled to a little ceremony. I don’t want to be didactic,’ said the Guardsman, ‘but----’ This remonstrance furnished Laurie with laughter for the rest of the evening; but Frank did not see the joke. Of course the young lady was nothing to him. This he explained fully. But it vexed him to think that his brother was falling into the free and easy habits which, he supposed, were current among the people who lived in those dingy streets, where every house boasted a long, central window, and the very atmosphere was redolent of paint;--beings who lived all their lives in shooting-coats and wide-awakes,--wild, untrimmed, hairy men, not fit to come into a lady’s society at any time. People on that level might be utterly indifferent and irreverent, and treat a woman as they treated their comrades; but that Laurie should fall into such ways vexed Frank. This was the chief subject of his thoughts as he bowled down through the darkness in the twelve o’clock train to Royalborough, where his battalion was quartered. It was another of the results of his father’s unfortunate will. Frank had been, as Mr. Renton foresaw, the one who felt it least. His nominal allowance had always been just what it now was, and his mother was as ready now as ever to supply him with those odd five-pound notes which drop in so pleasantly to a youthful pocket. It made no more difference than his father’s death must have made under any circumstances. There was no longer a bright and pleasant house to take his friends to, but that had nothing to do with the will, and was at the present moment a necessity of nature. And then he had his profession, and liked it, and might hope for advancement in it. And in the meantime he had made up his mind to go to India, a proceeding which had its pleasant as well as unpleasant aspects. He had sold his pet