and everything changed--everything--everything! I am a very old man,
Mary Anne."

He was fifty-two years of age; he felt quite an old man. He had spent
all his money, he had outlived the best friends of his youth; for it
had been his fate to adorn a declining era, and he had been a youngster
among elderly patrons and associates. His patrons were dead and gone,
and the men he had patronised shut their doors upon him in the day of
his poverty. As for his relations, he had turned his back upon them
long ago, when first he followed in the shining wake of that gorgeous
vessel, the Royal George. In this hour of his penniless decline there
was none to help him. To have outlived every affection and every
pleasure is the chief bitterness of old age; and this bitterness
Horatio Paget suffered in all its fulness, though his years were but
fifty-two.

"I am a very old man, Mary Anne," he repeated plaintively. But Mary
Anne Kepp could not think him old. To her eyes he must for ever appear
the incarnation of all that is elegant and distinguished. He was the
first gentleman she had ever seen. Mrs. Kepp had given shelter to other
lodgers who had called themselves gentlemen, and who had been pompous
and grandiose of manner in their intercourse with the widow and her
daughter; but O, what pitiful lacquered counterfeits, what Brummagem
paste they had been, compared to the real gem! Mary Anne Kepp had seen
varnished boots before the humble flooring of her mother's dwelling was
honoured by the tread of Horatio Paget, but what clumsy vulgar boots,
and what awkward plebeian feet had worn them! The lodger's slim white
hands and arched instep, the patrician curve of his aquiline nose, the
perfect grace of his apparel, the high-bred modulation of his courteous
accents,--all these had impressed Mary Anne's tender little heart so