us. It may come on us, unawares, in some solitary byway of our life;
strike us in our unsuspecting privacy; thwart as in some blessed hope we
have never told to another; for the moment the world sees that it is Hate
that strikes us, its worst power of mischief is gone.

We have a great many names for the same passion,--Envy, Jealousy, Spite,
Prejudice, Rivalry; but they are so many synonyms for the one old heathen
demon. When the death-giving shaft of Apollo sent the plague to some
unhappy Achaean, it did not much matter to the victim whether the god
were called Helios or Smintheus.

No man you ever met in the world seemed more raised above the malice of
Hate than Audley Egerton: even in the hot war of politics he had scarcely
a personal foe; and in private life he kept himself so aloof and apart
from others that he was little known, save by the benefits the waste of
his wealth conferred. That the hate of any one could reach the austere
statesman on his high pinnacle of esteem,--you would have smiled at the
idea! But Hate is now, as it ever has been, an actual Power amidst "the
Varieties of Life;" and, in spite of bars to the door, and policemen in
the street, no one can be said to sleep in safety while there wakes the
eye of a single foe.




CHAPTER II.

The glory of Bond Street is no more. The title of Bond Street Lounger
has faded from our lips. In vain the crowd of equipages and the blaze of
shops: the renown of Bond Street was in its pavement, its pedestrians.