“And long be it so,” said Colonel Morley, with grateful earnestness; “and may such be my passport to your confidence, Mrs. Haughton. Charles was my old schoolfellow,--a little boy when I and Darrell were in the sixth form; and, pardon me, when I add, that if that gentleman were ever Charles Haughton’s particular friend, he could scarcely have been a very wise one. For unless his appearance greatly belies his years he must have been little more than a boy when Charles Haughton left Lionel fatherless.” Here, in the delicacy of tact, seeing that Mrs. Haughton looked ashamed of the subject, and seemed aware of her imprudence, the Colonel rose, with a request--cheerfully granted--that Lionel might be allowed to come to breakfast with him the next morning. CHAPTER XI. A man of the world, having accepted a troublesome charge, considers “what he will do with it;” and, having promptly decided, is sure, first, that he could not have done better; and, secondly, that much may be said to prove that he could not have done worse. Reserving to a later occasion anymore detailed description of Colonel Morley, it suffices for the present to say that he was a man of a very fine understanding as applied to the special world in which he lived. Though no one had a more numerous circle of friends, and though with many of those friends he was on that footing of familiar intimacy which Darrell’s active career once, and his rigid seclusion of late, could not have established with any idle denizen of that brilliant society in which Colonel Morley moved and had his being, yet to Alban Morley’s heart (a heart not easily reached) no friend was so dear as Guy Darrell. They had entered Eton on the same day, left it the same day, lodged while there in the same house; and though of very different characters, formed one of those strong, imperishable, brotherly affections which the Fates weave into the very woof of existence.