still more as member of a privileged order, he should have been
justifying his existence and his position by some useful effort. At
three and twenty he had succeeded to the title--and to very little
else; the family had long been in decline; a Lord Dymchurch who died
in the early part of the nineteenth century practically completed
the ruin of his house by an attempt to form a Utopia in Canada, and
since then a rapid succession of ineffectual peers, _fruges
consumere nati_, had steadily reduced the dignity of the name. The
present lord--Walter Erwin de Gournay Fallowfield--found himself
inheritor of one small farm in the county of Kent, and of funded
capital which produced less than a thousand a year; his ancestral
possessions had passed into other hands, and, excepting the Kentish
farm-house, Lord Dymchurch had not even a dwelling he could call his
own. Two sisters were his surviving kin; their portions being barely
sufficient to keep them alive, he applied to their use a great part
of his own income; unmarried, and little likely to change their
condition, these ladies lived together, very quietly, at a country
house in Somerset, where their brother spent some months of every
year with them. For himself, he had rooms at Highgate Grove, not
unpleasant lodgings in a picturesque old house, where he kept the
books which were indispensable to him, and a few pictures which he
had loved from boyhood. All else that remained from the slow
Dymchurch wreck was down in Somerset.

He saw himself as one of the most useless of mortals. For his
sisters' sake he would have been glad to make money, and one way of
doing so was always open to him; he had but to lend his name to
company promoters, who again and again had sought him out with
tempting proposals. This, however, Lord Dymchurch disdained; he was
fastidious in matters of honour, as on some points of taste. For the