Cabinet. . . . No! he has no children living: very natural he should
marry again. . . . A nephew!--you are quite mistaken. Young Haughton
is no nephew: a very distant connection; could not expect to be the heir
. . . . It was given out, though, at Paris. The Duchess thought so,
and so did Lady Jane. They'll not be so civil to young Haughton now. .
. . Hush--"

Lionel, wishing to hear no more, glided by, and penetrated farther into
the throng. And then, as he proceeded, with those last words on his ear,
the consciousness came upon him that his position had undergone a change.
Difficult to define it; to an ordinary bystander people would have seemed
to welcome him cordially as ever. The gradations of respect in polite
society are so exquisitely delicate, that it seems only by a sort of
magnetism that one knows from day to day whether one has risen or
declined. A man has lost high office, patronage, power, never perhaps to
regain them. People don't turn their backs on him; their smiles are as
gracious, their hands as flatteringly extended. But that man would be
dull as a rhinoceros if he did not feel--as every one who accosts him
feels--that he has descended in the ladder. So with all else. Lose even
your fortune, it is not the next day in a London drawing-room that your
friends look as if you were going to ask them for five pounds. Wait a
year or so for that. But if they have just heard you are ruined, you
will feel that they have heard it, let them bow ever so courteously,
smile ever so kindly. Lionel at Paris, in the last year or so, had been
more than fashionable: he had been the fashion,--courted, run after,
petted, quoted, imitated. That evening he felt as an author may feel who
has been the rage, and without fault of his own is so no more. The rays
that had gilded him had gone back to the orb that lent. And they who
were most genial still to Lionel Haughton were those who still most
respected thirty-five thousand pounds a year--in Guy Darrell!