In fact, the Camborne family regarded the whole thing as a rather too amiable weakness on the part of their guest. The bishop, who was always running backwards and forwards at this time from his palace at Carlton to his house in Grosvenor Street, often made a genial jest upon the subject to the young man. "My dear Paddington," he would say, "how is the attack going? Ha, ha! Every day, when I open my newspapers, I find that the general public is being worked up to a perfect froth of excitement about this forthcoming theatrical enterprise. A peer in the pillory! The duke in the dock! How amusing it all is!"
Thus the bishop scoffed on more than one occasion, and his witticisms had no very exhilarating effect upon the duke.
His life in Grosvenor Street was happier with the younger members of the family. His dear friend Gerald was still as sympathetic and vivid as ever. Lord Hayle had passed the test of intimate human association, and come out of it very well. Lady Constance was as ever—beautiful, sweet, and sympathetic—but the duke was finding that in the very splendour of the girl's nature and appearance there was something a trifle cloying. He was deeply in love with her; he knew also that she cared for him, but for the first time in his guarded, shielded life he saw before him times of indecision and of trouble. Life, which had seemed so smooth and stately, so well ordered a thing, was not quite what it had been. The serene repose of his mind was disturbed by all he had gone through.
Sometimes he went and took tea with Mrs. Rose, and often her husband, Mr. Conrad, and Mary Marriott were there. He never attempted to argue with any of them. He took their shafts of wit with a quiet complaisance, but if they thought that their epigrams had not gone home they were very deeply mistaken.
One afternoon, tired and troubled, the duke bethought himself of his great house in Piccadilly. He walked there from Grosvenor Street, astonished the servants by ringing the bell, and, entering, he moodily surveyed some of his famous possessions.
Then he turned into the library. The three great fires were burning down. It was about six o'clock. He switched on the electric light himself and wandered through the maze of his treasures.
He came up to a table—a huge writing-table, covered with red leather—and saw upon it five or six sheets of manuscript in careful handwriting. Forgetting exactly what he was doing, thinking nothing of the man he had appointed to be librarian, the duke sat down and began to read.