At the town house there was no money, at Mount Dunstan there was no money.

There had been so little money even in his grandfather's time that his father had inherited comparative beggary.

The fourteenth Earl of Mount Dunstan did not call it "comparative" beggary, he called it beggary pure and simple, and cursed his progenitors with engaging frankness.

He never referred to the fact that in his personable youth he had married a wife whose fortune, if it had not been squandered, might have restored his own.

The fortune had been squandered in the course of a few years of riotous living, the wife had died when her third son was born, which event took place ten years after the birth of her second, whom she had lost through scarlet fever.