willing to make a sacrifice, for which he must pinch himself, and conclude
the business. This touched the son, but Saville laughed him out of the
twinge of good feeling; and very shortly afterwards, Percy Godolphin was
gazetted as a cornet in the ---- Life-Guards.

The life of a soldier, in peace, is indolent enough, Heaven knows! Percy
liked the new uniforms and the new horses--all of which were bought on
credit. He liked his new companions; he liked balls; he liked flirting;
he did not dislike Hyde Park from four o'clock till six; and he was not
very much bored by drills and parade. It was much to his credit in the
world that he was the protege of a man who had so great a character for
profligacy and gambling as Augustus Saville; and under such auspices he
found himsef launched at once into the full tide of "good society."

Young, romantic, high-spirited--with the classic features of an Antinous,
and a very pretty knack of complimenting and writing verses--Percy
Godolphin soon became, while yet more fit in years for the nursery than
the world, "the curled darling" of that wide class of high-born women who
have nothing to do but to hear love made to them, and who, all artifice
themselves, think the love sweetest which srings from the most natural
source. They like boyhood when it is not bashful; and from sixteen to
twenty, a Juan need scarcely go to Seville to find a Julia.

But love was not the worst danger that menaced the intoxicated boy.
Saville, the most seductive of tutors--Saville who, in his wit; his bon
ton, his control over the great world, seemed as a god to all less
elevated and less aspiring,--Saville was Godolphin's constant companion;
and Saville was worse than a profligate--he was a gambler! One would
think that gaming was the last vice that could fascinate the young: its
avarice, its grasping, its hideous selfishness, its cold, calculating