the first impressions of all he saw and did. There was a racy, wholesome
gusto in his enjoyment of novelty and independence. His balls and his
dinners and his cricket at Lord's, his partners and his companions, his
general gayety, his occasional ennui, furnisbed ample materials to one
who felt he was corresponding with another heart, and had nothing to fear
or to conceal.

But about two months before this portion of our narrative opens with the
coronation, Lady Mary's favourite sister, who had never married, and who,
by the death of her parents, was left alone in the worse than widowhood
of an old maid, had been ordered to Pisa for a complaint that betrayed
pulmonary symptoms; and Lady Mary, with her usual unselfishness,
conquered both her aversion to movement and her wish to be in reach of
her son, to accompany abroad this beloved and solitary relative. Captain
Greville was pressed into service as their joint cavalier. And thus
Percival's habitual intercourse with his two principal correspondents
received a temporary check.




CHAPTER IV.

JOHN ARDWORTH.

At noon the next day Beck, restored to his grandeur, was at the helm of
his state; Percival was vainly trying to be amused by the talk of two or
three loungers who did him the honour to smoke a cigar in his rooms; and
John Ardworth sat in his dingy cell in Gray's Inn, with a pile of law
books on the table, and the daily newspapers carpeting a footstool of