CHAPTER I.
In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betray'd by what is false within.
-- GEORGE MEREDITH.
"I can't get out," said Sterne's starling, looking through the bars of his cage.
"I will get out," said Hugh Scarlett to himself, seeing no bars, but half conscious of a cage.

"I will get out," he repeated, as his hansom took him swiftly from the house in Portman Square, where he had been dining, towards that other house in Carlton House Terrace, whither his thoughts had travelled on before him, out-distancing the _trip-clip-clop, trip-clip-clop_ of the horse.
It was a hot night in June.

Hugh had thrown back his overcoat, and the throng of passers-by in the street could see, if they cared to see, "the glass of fashion" in the shape of white waistcoat and shirt front, surmounted by the handsome, irritated face of their owner, leaning back with his hat tilted over his eyes.
_Trip-clip-clop_ went the horse.
A great deal of thinking may be compressed into a quarter of an hour, especially if it has been long eluded.
"I will get out," he said again to himself with an impatient movement.
It was beginning to weary him, this commonplace intrigue which had been so new and alluring a year ago.

He did not own it to himself, but he was tired of it.

Perhaps the reason why good resolutions have earned for themselves such an evil repute as paving-stones is because they are often the result, not of repentance, but of the restlessness that dogs an evaporating pleasure.