fellow, of about seven-and-twenty; the only son of a younger brother of
Sir Michael Audley. His father had left him L400 a year, which his
friends had advised him to increase by being called to the bar; and as
he found it, after due consideration, more trouble to oppose the wishes
of these friends than to eat so many dinners, and to take a set of
chambers in the Temple, he adopted the latter course, and unblushingly
called himself a barrister.

Sometimes, when the weather was very hot, and he had exhausted himself
with the exertion of smoking his German pipe, and reading French novels,
he would stroll into the Temple Gardens, and lying in some shady spot,
pale and cool, with his shirt collar turned down and a blue silk
handkerchief tied loosely about his neck, would tell grave benchers that
he had knocked himself up with over work.

The sly old benchers laughed at the pleasant fiction; but they all
agreed that Robert Audley was a good fellow; a generous-hearted fellow;
rather a curious fellow, too, with a fund of sly wit and quiet humor,
under his listless, dawdling, indifferent, irresolute manner. A man who
would never get on in the world; but who would not hurt a worm. Indeed,
his chambers were converted into a perfect dog-kennel, by his habit of
bringing home stray and benighted curs, who were attracted by his looks
in the street, and followed him with abject fondness.

Robert always spent the hunting season at Audley Court; not that he was
distinguished as a Nimrod, for he would quietly trot to covert upon a
mild-tempered, stout-limbed bay hack, and keep at a very respectful
distance from the hard riders; his horse knowing quite as well as he
did, that nothing was further from his thoughts than any desire to be in
at the death.