offer a salary
of three hundred a year to any gentlemanly person capable of performing
the duties of secretary to a newly-established company. It was only
after responding to this promising offer that the applicant was
informed that he must possess one indispensable qualification in the
shape of a capital of five hundred pounds. Mr Hawkehurst laughed aloud
when the Captain imparted this condition with that suave and yet
dignified manner which was peculiar to him.

"I ought to have known it was a dodge of that kind," said the young man
coolly. "Those very good things--duties light and easy, hours from
twelve till four, speedy advancement certain for a conscientious and
gentlemanly person, and so on--are always of the genus _do_. Your
advertisement is very cleverly worded, my dear sir; only it's like the
rest of them, rather _too_ clever. It is so difficult for a clever man
not to be too clever. The prevailing weakness of the human intellect
seems to me to be exaggeration. However, as I haven't a five-pound note
in the world, or the chance of getting one, I'll wish you good morning,
Captain Paget."

There are people whose blood would have been turned to ice by the stony
glare of indignation with which Horatio Paget regarded the man who had
dared to question his probity. But Mr. Hawkehurst had done with strong
impressions long before he met the Captain; and he listened to that
gentleman's freezing reproof with an admiring smile. Out of this very
unpromising beginning there arose a kind of friendship between the two
men. Horatio Paget had for some time been in need of a clever tool; and
in the young man whose cool insolence rose superior to his own dignity
he perceived the very individual whom he had long been seeking. The
young man who was unabashed by the indignation of a scion of Nugents
and Cromies and Pagets must be utterly impervious to the sense of awe;
and it was just such an impervious young man that the Captain wanted as
his coadjutor. Thus arose the alliance, which grew stronger every day,
until Valentine took up his abode under the roof of his employer and
patron, and made himself more thoroughly at home there than the
unwelcome daughter of the house.

The history of Valentine Hawkehurst's past existence was tolerably well
known to the Captain; but the only history of the young man's early
life ever heard by Diana was rather vague and fragmentary. She
discovered, little by little, that he was the son of a sp