Page 579 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

‘What a fool I am,’ thought John Rex, as he dressed. ‘I
shall spoil everything if I don’t take care.’ He was right. He
was going the right way to spoil everything. However, for
this bout he made amends- money soothed the servants’
hall, and apologies and time won Lady Devine’s forgive-
ness.
‘I cannot yet conform to English habits, my dear mother,’
said Rex, ‘and feel at times out of place in your quiet home.
I think that—if you can spare me a little money—I should
like to travel.’
Lady Devine—with a sense of relief for which she blamed
herself—assented, and supplied with letters of credit, John
Rex went to Paris.
Fairly started in the world of dissipation and excess, he
began to grow reckless. When a young man, he had been
singularly free from the vice of drunkenness; turning his
sobriety—as he did all his virtues— to vicious account; but
he had learnt to drink deep in the loneliness of the bush.
Master of a large sum of money, he had intended to spend
it as he would have spent it in his younger days. He had
forgotten that since his death and burial the world had
not grown younger. It was possible that Mr. Lionel Crof-
ton might have discovered some of the old set of fools and
knaves with whom he had once mixed. Many of them were
alive and flourishing. Mr. Lemoine, for instance, was re-
spectably married in his native island of Jersey, and had
already threatened to disinherit a nephew who showed a
tendency to dissipation.
But Mr. Lemoine would not care to recognize Mr. Lionel

For the Term of His Natural Life