that the boy has his own way to make in life. Is this meant to guard
against too sanguine notions of inheritance, which his generosity may
have excited? The letter to Lord L'Estrange was of a very different kind
from the others. It was long, and full of such little scraps of news and
gossip as may interest friends in a foreign land; it was written gayly,
and as with a wish to cheer his friend; you could see that it was a reply
to a melancholy letter; and in the whole tone and spirit there was an
affection, even to tenderness, of which those who most liked Audley
Egerton would have scarcely supposed him capable. Yet, notwithstanding,
there was a kind of constraint in the letter, which perhaps only the fine
tact of a woman would detect. It had not that abandon, that hearty self-
outpouring, which you might expect would characterize the letters of two
such friends, who had been boys at school together, and which did breathe
indeed in all the abrupt rambling sentences of his correspondent. But
where was the evidence of the constraint? Egerton is off-hand enough
where his pen runs glibly through paragraphs that relate to others; it is
simply that he says nothing about himself,--that he avoids all reference
to the inner world of sentiment and feeling! But perhaps, after all, the
man has no sentiment and feeling! How can you expect that a steady
personage in practical life, whose mornings are spent in Downing Street,
and whose nights are consumed in watching Government bills through a
committee, can write in the same style as an idle dreamer amidst the
pines of Ravenna, or on the banks of Como?

Audley had just finished this epistle, such as it was, when the attendant
in waiting announced the arrival of a deputation from a provincial
trading town, the members of which deputation he had appointed to meet at
two o'clock. There was no office in London at which deputations were
kept waiting less than at that over which Mr. Egerton presided.