him. He was certain he liked hunting better than anything else in the
world--for instance. He was certain he knew his own mind, and
therefore perfectly certain his passion for Isabella Waring would last
for ever! Ready to swear eternal devotion with that delightful
inconsequence of youth in its unreason, thinking to control an emotion
as Canute's flatterers would have had him do the waves.

And the Creator of waves--and emotions--no doubt smiled to Himself--if
He is not tired by now of smiling at the follies of the moles called
human beings, who for the most part inhabit His earth!

Paul was young, as I said, and fair and strong. He had been in the
eleven at Eton and left Oxford with a record for all that should turn
a beautiful Englishman into a perfect athlete. Books had not worried
him much! The fit of a hunting-coat, the pace of a horse, were things
of more importance, but he scraped through his "Smalls" and his
"Mods," and was considered by his friends to be anything but a
fool. As for his mother--the Lady Henrietta Verdayne--she thought him
a god among men!

Paul went to London like others of his time, and attended the
theatres, where perfectly virtuous young ladies display nightly their
innocent charms in hilarious choruses, arrayed in the latest
_modes_. He supped, too, with these houris--and felt himself a
man of the world.

He had stayed about in country houses for perhaps a year, and had
danced through the whole of a season with all the prettiest
_debutantes_. And one or two of the young married women of forty
had already marked him out for their prey.