the last sum I conveyed to him--I
must remember to find him out and replenish his stores.--Do not forget,"
said he aloud, "to see Cesarini, and urge him to accept the appointment
we spoke of."

"I will not forget it--I will see him to-morrow before we meet. Yet it
is a painful task, Ernest."

"I allow it. Alas! Florence, you owe him some reparation. He undoubtedly
once conceived himself entitled to form hopes the vanity of which his
ignorance of our English world and his foreign birth prevented him from
suspecting."

"Believe me, I did not give him the right to form such expectations."

"But you did not sufficiently discourage them. Ah, Florence, never
underrate the pangs of hope crushed, of love contemned."

"Dreadful!" said Florence, almost shuddering. "It is strange, but my
conscience never so smote me before. It is since I loved that I feel,
for the first time, how guilty a creature is--"

"A coquette!" interrupted Maltravers. "Well, let us think of the past no
more; but if we can restore a gifted man, whose youth promised much,
to an honourable independence and a healthful mind, let us do so. Me,
Cesarini never can forgive; he will think I have robbed him of you. But
we men--the woman we have once loved, even after she rejects us, ever
has some power over us, and your eloquence, which has so often roused
me, cannot fail to impress a nature yet more excitable."

Maltravers, on quitting Florence at her own door, went home, summoned
his favourite servant, gave him Cesarini's address at Chelsea, bade him
find out where he was, if he had left his lodgings; and leave at his
present home, or (failing its discovery) at the "Travellers," a cover,
which he made his servant address, inclosing a bank-note of some amount.
If the reader wonder why Maltravers thus constituted himself the unknown
benefactor of the Italian, I must tell him that he does not understand
Maltravers. Cesarini was not the only man of letters whose faults he
pitied, whose wants he relieved. Though his name seldom shone in the
pompous list of public subscriptions--though he disdained to affect the
Maecenas and the patron, he felt the brotherhood of mankind, and a kind
of gratitude for those who aspired to rise or to delight their species.
An author himself, he could appreciate the vast debt which the world
owes to authors, and pays but by calumny in life and barren laurels
after death. He whose profession is the Beautiful succeeds only
through the