Indeed, it was necessary that he should be present and in attendance on

his _fiancêe_ who appeared at every function. Maude was now almost as

celebrated as Sir Stephen; for her beauty, her reputed wealth, and the

fact that she was engaged to the son of Sir Stephen, had raised her to

an exalted position in the fashionable world; and her name figured in

the newspapers very nearly as often as that of the great financier.

She had stepped from obscurity into that notoriety, for which we all of

us have such a morbid craving, almost in a single day; and she queened

it with a languid grace and self-possession which established her

position on a firm basis. Wherever she went she was the centre and

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object of a small crowd of courtiers; the men admired her, and the

women envied her; for nowadays most women would rather marry wealth

than rank, unless the latter were accompanied by a long rent roll--and

in these hard times for landlords, too many English noblemen, have no

rent roll at all, short or long.

Excepting his father's, Stafford went to very few houses, and spent

most of his time, when not in attendance on Maude, in the solitude of

his own chambers, or in the smoking-room of one of the quietest of his

clubs. Short as the time had been, the matter of a few weeks only since

had parted from Ida, he had greatly changed; so changed that not seldom

the bright and buoyant and overbright Sir Stephen seemed to be younger

than his son. He was too busy, too absorbed in the pursuit of his

ambition, the skilful steering of the enterprise he had so successfully

launched to notice the change; but it was noticed by others, and

especially by Howard. Often he watched Stafford moving moodily about

his father's crowded rooms, with the impassive face which men wear when

they have some secret trouble or anxiety which they conceal as the

Spartan boy concealed the fox which was gnawing at his vitals; or

Howard came upon him in the corner of a half-darkened smoking-room,

with an expired cigar in his lips, and his eyes fixed on a newspaper

which was never turned.

By that unwritten code by which we are all governed nowadays, Howard

could not obtrude by questioning his friend, and Stafford showed no

signs of making any voluntary statement or explanation. He suffered in

a silence with which he kept at arm's-length even his closed friend;

and Howard pondered and worried in a futile attempt to guess at the

trouble which had changed Stafford from a light-hearted man, with an

immense capacity for pleasure, to a moody individual to whom the

pleasures of life seemed absolutely distasteful.




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