were never at home when he assailed their doors with his fashionable
knock. He could no longer endure the humiliation of such repulses, for
he began to understand that the servants knew his errand as well as
their masters, and had their answers ready, let him present himself
before them when he would: so he besieged the doors of St. James's and
Mayfair, Kensington Gore and Netting Hill, no longer. He knew that the
bubble of his poor foolish life had burst, and that there was nothing
left for him but to die.

It seemed about this time as if the end of all was very near. Captain
Paget caught a chill one miserable evening on which he returned to his
lodging with his garments dripping, and his beautiful varnished boots
reduced to a kind of pulp; and the chill resulted in a violent
inflammation of the lungs. Then it was that a woman's hand was held out
to save him, and a woman's divine tenderness cared for him in his dire
extremity.

The ministering angel who comforted this helpless and broken-down
wayfarer was only a low-born ignorant girl called Mary Anne Kepp--a
girl who had waited upon the Captain during his residence in her
mother's house, but of whom he had taken about as much notice as he had
been wont to take of the coloured servants who tended him when he was
with his regiment in India. Horatio Paget had been a night-brawler and
a gamester, a duellist and a reprobate, in the glorious days that were
gone; but he had never been a profligate; and he did not know that the
girl who brought him his breakfast and staggered under the weight of
his coal-scuttle was one of the most beautiful women he had ever looked
upon.

The Captain was so essentially a creature of the West-end, that Beauty