allow him to risk a black eye.'"

"Might not remorse at the sight of the man he had injured have had
something to do with his flight?" Bruce asked.

He was full of moral sentiments--that man; only you could not look at
him without fancying that they sprung more from an inclination to be
contradictious and disagreeable than from any depth of principle.

"Absurd," Guy retorted. "Wasn't he a heathen, and rather an immoral one?
It was of profligates with far greater advantages of education that some
one said, '_'Le remords nait de l'abandon, et non de la faute_.' The
walls of Troy were strong then, and the Destroyer-of-ships safe behind
them, 'getting herself up alarmingly' for his return. No wonder Menelaüs
was eager for the duel: he was staking his loneliness against Paris's
nine points of the law."

Sir Henry Fallowfield smiled approvingly.

"Yes," he observed, not answering what had been said, but evidently
following out a train of his own thought. "Modern exquisites have
courage, and self-possession, and conceit--great elements of success
with women, I own--but they have not much more. I am certain Charley,
who is a favorable specimen of the class, often affects silence because
he has nothing on earth to say. There is a decadence since my younger
days (I hope I speak dispassionately), and how very far we fell short of
the _roués_ of the Régence! We could no more match them than a
fighting-man in good training could stand up to one of the old Pict
giants. Look at Richelieu: good at all points--in the battle, in the
boudoir, in the Bastille--a dangerous rival at the two ages of ordinary