of "My only son, William;" and should a
stranger, dining at the Abbey, casually refer to
the picture, by Lawrence, of two little boys,
one riding a pony, the younger decking a
dog's neck with ribbon, he is, if the squire has
not heard his question, motioned in dumb show
to silence, or is replied to by the squire
himself that "that boy is—lost, sir."

That boy, Stewart Routh, the man looking
out of the window in South Molton-street, was
captain of the boat at Eton, and first favourite,
for a time, both with the dons and
undergraduates at Oxford. Rumours of high play at
cards developing into fact of perpetually sported
"oak," non-attendance at chapel, and frequent
shirking of classes, lessened the esteem in
which Mr. Routh was held by the authorities;
and a written confession handed to the dean,
after being obtained by parental pressure,
from Mr. Albert Grüntz, of Christ Church, son
of and heir to Mr. Jacob Grüntz, sugar-baker,
of St. Mary Axe, in the city of London, and
Balmoral-gardens, Hyde Park, a confession to the
effect that he, Mr. A. Grüntz, had lost the sum
of two thousand pounds to Mr. S. Routh, at a
game played with dice, and known as French
hazard, procured the dismissal of Mr. S. Routh
from the seat of learning. At Carr Abbey,
whither he retired, his stay was shortened by
the arrival of another document from Oxford,
this time signed by Lord Hawkhurst, gentleman
commoner of Christ Church, and Arthur
Wardroper of Balliol, setting forth that Mr.
S. Routh, while playing hazard in Mr.
Grüntz's rooms, had been caught there in
flagrante delicto in the act of cheating by
"securing," i.e. retaining in his fingers, one of the
dice which he should have shaken from the box.
It was the receipt of this letter that caused the
squire to make the erasure in the family Bible,
and to look upon his youngest son as dead.

Driven from the paternal roof, Mr. Stewart
Routh descended upon the pleasant town of
Boulogne, whence, after a short stay not
unmarked by many victories over the old and
young gentlemen who frequent the card-tables
at the Etablissement des Bains, from whom he
carried off desirable trophies, he proceeded to
the baths and gambling-houses of Ems,
Homburg, and Baden-Baden. It was at the last-
mentioned place, and when in the very noon
and full tide of success, that he was struck
down by a fever, so virulent that the affrighted
servants of the hotel refused to wait upon
him. No nurse could be prevailed upon
to undertake to attend him; and he would
have been left to die for want of proper
care, had not a young Englishwoman, named
Harriet Creswick, travelling in the capacity
of nursery-governess to Lord de
Mauleverer's family (then passing through Baden
on their way to winter in Rome), come to the
rescue. Declaring that her countryman should
not perish like a dog, she there and then
devoted herself to attendance on the sick man.
It need scarcely be told that Lady de
Mauleverer, protesting against "such extraordinary
conduct," intimated to Miss Creswick that her
connexion with her noble charges must cease
at once and for ever. But it is noteworthy that
in such a man as Stewart Routh had hitherto
proved himself, a spirit of gratitude should have
been so strongly aroused, that when his sense
and speech returned to him, in weak and faltering
accents he implored the woman who had so
tenderly nursed him through his illness, to
become his wife. It is quite needless to say
that his friends, on hearing of it, averred, some
that he thought he was going to die, and that it
did not matter to him what he did, while it
might have pleased the young lady; others, that
he was a particularly knowing card whose
brains had never deserted him, even when he
was at his worst, and that he had discovered
in Harriet Creswick a woman exactly fitted,
by physical and mental qualifications,
efficiently to help him as his partner in playing
the great game of Life. Be it as it
may—and people will talk, especially in such
circles—the fact remains that on his sick
couch at the Hollandischer Hof, Baden-Baden,
Stewart Routh proposed to Harriet
Creswick, and was accepted; that so soon as
he could safely be left, she departed for
England; and that within a month they were
married in London.

Of that one event at least in all his eventful
life, Stewart Routh had never repented.
Through all his vicissitudes of fortune his wife
had been by his side, and, as in the long run,
chance had been against him, taking the heaviest
portion of his burden on herself. Harriet
Routh's was an untiring, undying, unquestioning
love or worship of her husband. The
revelation of his—to say the least of it—loose mode
of life, the shifts and expedients to which he
resorted for getting money, the questionable
company in which he habitually lived, would
have told with fatal effect on a devotion less
thorough, a passion more transient. Harriet
herself, who had been brought up staidly at an
Institution, which she had only quitted to join
the family with whom she was travelling when
she arrived at Baden—Harriet herself at first
shrunk back stunned and stupified by the
revelations of an unknown life which burst
upon her a few days after her marriage.
But her love bore her through it. As the
dyer's hand assimilates to that it works in, so
gradually did Harriet Routh endue herself with
her husband's tone, temper, and train of thought,
until, having become almost his second self, she
was his most trusted ally, his safest counsellor in
all the strange schemes by which he made out
life. In the early days after their marriage she
had talked to him once, only once, and then but
for a few minutes, of reformation, of something
better and more reputable, of doing with less
money, to be obtained by the exercise of his
great talents in some legitimate manner. And
her husband, with the nearest approach to harshness
that before or since he had ever assumed,
told her that his time for that kind of thing was
past and gone for ever, that she must forget all