period of his decadence. He tried to live in an honest gentlemanly way,
by borrowing money of his friends, or discounting an accommodation-bill
obtained from some innocent acquaintance who was deluded by his
brilliant appearance and specious tongue into a belief in the transient
nature of his difficulties. He spent his days in hanging about the
halls and waiting-rooms of clubs--of some of which he had once been a
member; he walked weary miles between St James's and Mayfair,
Kensington Gore and Notting Hill, leaving little notes for men who were
not at home, or writing a little note in one room while the man to whom
he was writing hushed his breath in an adjoining chamber. People who
had once been Captain Paget's fast friends seemed to have
simultaneously decided upon spending their existence out of doors, as
it appeared to the impecunious Captain. The servants of his friends
were afflicted with a strange uncertainty as to their masters'
movements. At whatever hall-door Horatio Paget presented himself, it
seemed equally doubtful whether the proprietor of the mansion would be
home to dinner that day, or whether he would be at home any time next
day, or the day after that, or at the end of the week, or indeed
whether he would ever come home again. Sometimes the Captain, calling
in the evening dusk, in the faint hope of gaining admittance to some
friendly dwelling, saw the glimmer of light under a dining-room door,
and heard the clooping of corks and the pleasant jingling of glass and
silver in the innermost recesses of a butler's pantry; but still the
answer was--not at home, and not likely to be home. All the respectable
world was to be out henceforth for Horatio Paget. But now and then at
the clubs he met some young man, who had no wife at home to keep watch
upon his purse and to wail piteously over a five-pound note
ill-bestowed, and who took compassion on the fallen spendthrift, and
believed, or pretended to believe, his story of temporary embarrassment;
and then the Captain dined sumptuously at a little French restaurant