"All your pretty ones?
Did you say all?"

A look from Clifford answered the interesting interrogatory.
"These, then," said Tomlinson, collecting in his hand the common
wealth,--"these, then, are all our remaining treasures!" As he spoke,
he jingled the coins mournfully in his palm, and gazing upon them with a
parental air, exclaimed,--

"Alas! regardless of their doom, the little victims play!"

"Oh, d---it!" said Ned, "no sentiment! Let us come to business at once.
To tell you the truth, I, for one, am tired of this heiress-hunting, and
a man may spend a fortune in the chase before he can win one."

"You despair then, positively, of the widow you have courted so long?"
asked Tomlinson.

"Utterly," rejoined Ned, whose addresses had been limited solely to the
dames of the middling class, and who had imagined himself at one
time, as he punningly expressed it, sure of a dear rib from
Cheapside,--"utterly; she was very civil to me at first, but when I
proposed, asked me, with a blush, for my 'references.' 'References?'
said I; 'why, I want the place of your husband, my charmer, not your
footman!' The dame was inexorable, said she could not take me without
a character, but hinted that I might be the lover instead of the
bridegroom; and when I scorned the suggestion, and pressed for the
parson, she told me point-blank, with her unlucky city pronunciation,
'that she would never accompany me to the halter!'"

"Ha, ha, ha!" cried Tomlinson, laughing. "One can scarcely blame the
good lady for that. Love rarely brooks such permanent ties. But have you
no other lady in your eye?"

"Not for matrimony,--all roads but those to the church!" While this
dissolute pair were thus conversing, Clifford, leaning against
the wainscot, listened to them with a sick and bitter feeling of
degradation, which till of late days had been a stranger to his breast.
He was at length aroused from his silence by Ned, who, bending forward
and placing his hand upon Clifford's knee, said abruptly,--

"In short, Captain, you must lead us once more to glory. We have still
our horses, and I keep my mask in my pocketbook, together with my comb.
Let us take the road to-morrow night, dash across the country towards
Salisbury, and after a short visit in that neighbourhood to a band of
old friends of mine,--bold fellows, who would have stopped the devil
himself when he was at work upon Stonehenge,--make a tour