Harry and Horace Stanhope were the grandsons of an impecunious English peer. The boys, together with an only sister, had been left orphans at an early age with small patrimonies to fall back upon. The children’s kindred and guardians had been, as Harry represented them, a good deal at a loss what to do with the lads in those hard times, where slenderly-provided-for sprigs of the aristocracy are concerned. It was far easier to deal with the girl, the interest of whose portion would pay the expenses of her education and furnish her with dress and pocket-money at a modest rate afterwards, while a childless aunt undertook to give her a home and bring her out in society until she attained her natural goal, a suitable establishment. But not only were the two lads destitute of any special ability which should make up for their lack of fortune among their compeers, one of the brothers, Horace, the elder of the two, though he was always put second to Harry, had started in life heavily weighted in any race for worldly success. From the effects of an illness in childhood in which the infection was caught from his younger brother, Horace had contracted a degree of deafness, not enough to reduce him to an ear-trumpet, but sufficient to put him at a serious disadvantage in the ordinary routine of school and college, and in social intercourse. The two brothers had always been inseparable; but though they formed a marked instance of fraternal alliance, they were as unlike in person and character as devoted friends sometimes are. The very nicknames bestowed on them at school and college, which burlesqued their close association, referred as often to the contrast as to the union between them. They were dubbed not only ‘Romulus and Remus,’ and ‘Hengist and Horsa,’ but ‘Valentine and Orson,’ and ‘Day and Night,’ or any other couple of terms linked yet opposed to each other, which schoolboy and undergraduate wits could compass. Harry was a fair-haired, sun-burned, comely young athlete, great in muscular development, the popular champion of boat-races and cricket-fields, though he had not reached the eminence of figuring in his university’s ‘eight’ or ‘eleven,’ and so had been denied the crowning glory of forming one of the heroes in any spring or summer at Putney or Lord’s. He was so frank and cordial, so honestly heedless of his own interests, no less than those of his neighbours, that it was hard, even for men as unlike him as Oliver Constable was, to resist altogether the influence of Harry’s involuntary good fellowship when they happened to come in contact with it.