work in the well-known city banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers &
Barking--to this square first-floor sitting-room, to its dimly white
panelled and painted walls, its nice details of carved work in chimney-
piece and ceiling, and the outlook from its tall, narrow windows. A
touch of old-world stateliness in its aspect satisfied his latent pride
of race. To certain natures not obscurity or slender means, but the
pretentious vulgarity which, in English-speaking countries, too often
goes along with these constitutes the burden and the offence.

To-night, however, things were different. Material objects remained the
same; but the conditions of existence had taken on a strange appearance,
and with that appearance Iglesias was bound to reckon, being uncertain as
yet whether it was destined to prove that of a friend or of an enemy. In
furtherance of such reckoning, he had declined dining at the public
table, in company with his hostess, Miss Eliza Hart, her devoted friend
and companion, and the three gentlemen--Mr. de Courcy Smyth, Mr. Farge,
and Mr. Worthington--who shared with him the hospitalities of Cedar
Lodge. He had dined here, upstairs, solitary; and Frederick, the German-
Swiss valet, had just finished clearing the table and departed. Usually
under such circumstances Iglesias would have taken a favourite book from
the carved Spanish mahogany bookcase containing his small library; and,
reading again that which he had often read before, would have found
therein the satisfaction of friendship, along with the soothing
influences of familiarity. But to-night neither Gibbon's _Rome_--a
handsome early edition in many volumes--_The Travels of Anacharsis_,
Evelyn's _Diary_, Napier's _Peninsular War_, John Stuart Mill's _Logic_,
Byron's _Poems_, nor those of Calderon, nor of that so-called "prodigy of
nature," Lope de Vega, not even the dear and immortal _Don Quixote_
himself, served to attract him. His own thoughts, his own life, filled
his whole horizon, leaving no space for the thoughts or lives of others.