The Sunday morning dawned brightly, and the church bells ringing brought me to my feet, and out into Piccadilly, in the forlorn hope that I might see my lady on her way to morning service,—­see her for the last time in life, perhaps.  Her locket I wore over my heart.  It had lain upon hers.  To see her was the most exquisite agony in the world.  But not to see her, and to feel that she was scarce quarter of a mile away, was beyond endurance.  I stood beside an area at the entrance to Arlington Street, and waited for an hour, quite in vain; watching every face that passed, townsmen in their ill-fitting Sunday clothes, and fine ladies with the footmen carrying velvet prayerbooks.  And some that I knew only stared, and others gave me distant bows from their coach windows.  For those that fall from fashion are dead to fashion.

Dorothy did not go to church that day.

It is a pleasure, my dears, when writing of that hour of bitterness, to record the moments of sweetness which lightened it.  As I climbed up to my rooms in Dover Street, I heard merry sounds above, and a cloud of smoke blew out of the door when I opened it.

“Here he is,” cried Mr. Fox.  “You see, Richard, we have not deserted you when we can win no more of your money.”

“Why, egad! the man looks as if he had had a calamity,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick.

“And there is not a Jew here,” Fox continued.  “Tho’ it is Sunday, the air in my Jerusalem chamber is as bad as in any crimps den in St. Giles’s.  ’Slife, and I live to be forty, I shall have as many underground avenues as his Majesty Louis the Eleventh.”

“He must have a place,” put in my Lord Carlisle.

“We must do something for him,” said Fox, “albeit he is an American and a Whig, and all the rest of the execrations.  Thou wilt have to swallow thy golden opinions, my buckskin, when we put thee in office.”

I was too overwhelmed even to protest.

“You are not in such a cursed bad way, when all is said, Richard,” said Fitzpatrick.  “Charles, when he loses a fortune, immediately borrows another.”

“If you stick to whist and quinze,” said Charles, solemnly, giving me the advice they were forever thrusting upon him, “and play with system, you may make as much as four thousand a year, sir.”

And this was how I was treated by those heathen and cynical macaronies, Mr. Fox’s friends.  I may not say the same for the whole of Brooks’s Club, tho’ I never darkened its doors afterwards.  But I encountered my Lord March that afternoon, and got only a blank stare in place of a bow.

Charles had collected (Heaven knows how!) the thousand pounds which he stood in my debt, and Mr. Storer and Lord Carlisle offered to lend me as much as I chose.  I had some difficulty in refusing, and more still in denying Charles when he pressed me to go with them to Richmond, where he had rooms for play over Sunday.

Banks brought me the news that Lord Comyn was sitting up, and had been asking for me that day; that he was recovering beyond belief.  But I was resolved not to go to Brook Street until the money affairs were settled on Monday with Mr. Dix, for I knew well that his Lordship would insist upon carrying out with the agent the contract he had so generously and hastily made, rather than let me pay an abnormal interest.