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He was a man of middle height, with small regular features, keen black eyes, thick black hair and moustache, small hands and feet, and a youthful, almost a boyish, figure. At a distance you might have guessed him five-and-twenty; and it was only when you looked closely at him that you noticed the lines round the eyes and deep indented furrows stretching from the nostrils to the corner of the mouth, which, like the ground-swell on the shore, told of the storms that had been. In the year '51 Nugent Uffington was looked upon as one of the likeliest young fellows in town, though he had nothing in the world beyond his handsome face, some two hundred a year, and his commission in the Grenadiers. Every one, however, was kind to the cheery good-looking lad; men lent him money and horses, women smiled upon him, and manoeuvring mothers, when they had no more daughters of their own to provide for, enlisted themselves in Nugent's service, and actually tried to procure for him some of the season's prizes. It was said at one time that he might have married Miss Amelia M'Craw, the prettier of the twin Scotch heiresses, who in their marriage gave up to the peerage what was meant for themselves. Good-natured Mrs. Waddledot Hepburn gave three dances (at the command of the Marchioness of Melton) in order that the young people might be thrown together; and old Waddledot himself used to lean across the railings by Apsley House regarding them caracoling in the distant Row with a 'Bless-you,-my-children!' kind of aspect. But, as fate would have it, in the month of June that year Mr. Mudge, whose father and grandfather had made an enormous fortune by converting old rags into shoddy-cloth in the village of Batley, Yorkshire, came to town to see the Great Exhibition, bringing with him his wife and letters of introduction to the members for the county and several leading spirits among the commercial magnates who were just beginning to colonise the now plutocratic region of Tyburnia. The people who asked them out to dinner did not think much of Mr. Mudge, who was a fat, stupid, good-looking man of a common type, but they (the male portion at least) found Mrs. Mudge very charming. She was a Canadian blonde, very pretty and piquante, whom Alfred Mudge had met when on a business excursion to Montreal, had a captivating way of saying saucy things with a tinge of French accent, and was sometimes full of sentiment, at others full of raillery, but always coquettish in the highest degree.