with that degree of polite culture which gives dignity and cures huffiness. I must get him out of London, out of England—cut him off from his mother's apron-strings, and the particular friends of his poor father who prowl unannounced into the widow's drawing room. He shall go to Paris—no better place to learn military theories, and be civilized out of huffy dispositions. No doubt my old friend, the chevalier, who has the art strategic at his finger-ends, might be induced to take him en pension, direct his studies, and keep him out of harm's way. I can secure to him the entrée into the circles of the rigid old Faubourg St. Germain, where manners are best bred, and household ties most respected. Besides, as I am so often at Paris myself, I shall have him under my eye; and a few years there spent in completing him as man may bring him nearer to that marshal's baton which every recruit should have in his eye, than if I started him at once, a raw boy, unable to take care of himself as an ensign, and unfitted, save by mechanical routine, to take care of others, should he live to buy the grade of a colonel."
The plans thus promptly formed Alban Morley briefly explained to Lionel, when the boy came to breakfast in Curzon Street, requesting him to obtain Mrs. Haughton's acquiescence in that exercise of the discretionary powers with which he had been invested by Mr. Darrell. To Lionel the proposition that commended the very studies to which his tastes directed his ambition, and placed his initiation into responsible manhood among scenes bright to his fancy, because new to his experience, seemed, of course, the perfection of wisdom.
Less readily pleased was poor Mrs. Haughton when her son returned to communicate the arrangement, backing a polite and well-worded letter from the Colonel with his own more artless eloquence. Instantly she flew off on the wing of her "little tempers." "What! her only son taken from her—sent to that horrid Continent, just when she was so respectably settled! What was the good of money if she was to be parted from her boy? Mr. Darrell might take the money back if he pleased—she would write and tell him so. Colonel Morley had no feeling; and she was shocked to think Lionel was in such unnatural hands. She saw very plainly that he no longer cared for her—a serpent's tooth, etc., etc." But as soon as the burst was over the sky cleared, and Mrs. Haughton became penitent and sensible. Then her grief for Lionel's loss was diverted by preparations for his departure. There was his wardrobe to see to—a patent portmanteau to purchase and to fill. And, all done, the last evening mother and son spent together, though painful at the
