at his table, covered with notes in every female handwriting
except the right one, and with cards of invitation to banquets and balls
and concerts, and "very earlies," and carpet dances--for our friend
was a very fashionable young man--but what is the use of even being
fashionable, if the person you love cares for you no more? And so out of
very wantonness, instead of opening notes sealed or stamped with every
form of coronet, he took up a business-like epistle, closed only with
a wafer, and saying in drollery, "I should think a dun," he took out a
script receipt for 20,000 pounds consols, purchased that morning in
the name of Endymion Ferrars, Esq. It was enclosed in half a sheet of
note-paper, on which were written these words, in a handwriting which
gave no clue of acquaintanceship, or even sex: "Mind--you are to send me
your first frank."

CHAPTER LXVIII

It was useless to ask who could it be? It could only be one person; and
yet how could it have been managed? So completely and so promptly! Her
lord, too, away; the only being, it would seem, who could have effected
for her such a purpose, and he the last individual to whom, perhaps, she
would have applied. Was it a dream? The long twilight was dying away,
and it dies away in the Albany a little sooner than it does in Park
Lane; and so he lit the candles on his mantel-piece, and then again
unfolded the document carefully, and read it and re-read it. It was not
a dream. He held in his hand firmly, and read with his eyes clearly,
the evidence that he was the uncontrolled master of no slight amount of
capital, and which, if treated with prudence, secured to him for life an
absolute and becoming independence. His heart beat and his cheek glowed.

What a woman! And how true were Myra's last words at Hurstley, that
women would be his best friends in life! He ceased to think; and,
dropping into his chair, fell into a reverie, in which the past and
the future seemed to blend, with some mingling of a vague and almost
ecstatic present. It was a dream of fair women, and even fairer
thoughts, domestic tenderness and romantic love, mixed up with strange
vicissitudes of lofty and fiery action, and passionate passages of
eloquence and power. The clock struck and roused him from his musing.
He fell from the clouds. Could he accept this boon? Was his doing so
consistent with that principle of independence on which he had resolved
to build up his life? The boon thus conferred m