first meeting, but it was not their last by many.




XI.


Meanwhile the lawyers were keeping at work with commendable diligence, and
Mr. Pennroyal was counting his chickens as hatched, and was as far as
possible from suspecting the underplot which was going on around him. On
the contrary, it seemed to him that he was becoming at last the assured
favorite of fortune. For this gentleman's life had not been, in all
respects, so prosperous as it appeared. To begin with, he had had a
deplorable weakness for dicing and card-playing, which had frequently
brought him in large sums, but which had ended by costing twenty times as
much as they had won for him. He gave up these forms of diversion,
therefore, and resolved to amass a fortune in a more regular manner. He
studied the stock-market profoundly, until he felt himself sufficiently
master of the situation, and when he entered the lists as a financier. He
bought and sold, and did his very best to buy cheap and to sell dear. He
made several lucky hits; but in the long run he found that the balance was
setting steadily against him. All his ready money was gone, and mortgages
began to settle down like birds of ill-omen upon his house and lands. It
was at this period that he married Kate Battledown; and with the money
that she brought him he began to retrieve his losses, and again the
horizon brightened. Alas! the improvement was only temporary. Ill-luck set
in once more, and more inveterately than ever. Kate's good money went
after his bad money, and neither returned. A good deal of it is said to
have found its way into the pockets of Major Bolingbroke, his second in