nfortunate that he should run across her at a
wrong moment, but he never imagined that the meeting with her was one of
design and not of accident.

Vane had the poetic temperament. He was human and emotional and--he was
weak. Had he lived two centuries later he might have fancied, and may be
with truth, that he suffered from neurasthenia. In the full-blooded days
of the early Georges the complaint was "vapours," otherwise liver, but
no one troubled about nerves. The ghastly heads of Jacobite rebels stuck
on Temple Bar were looked upon with indifference by the passers-by. The
crowds which thronged to Tyburn to witness the half hangings and the
hideous disembowelling which followed, while the poor wretches, found
guilty of treason, were yet alive, had pretty much the sensation with
which a gathering nowadays sees a dangerous acrobatic performance.

Vane had none of this brutish callousness. He was more susceptible to
sex influences. Despite his worship of Lavinia, whom he elevated into a
sort of divinity, and who satisfied the more refined part of his nature
and his love of romance, he was not insensible to the animal charms of
Sally Salisbury. The cunning jade was familiar with all the arts of her
profession. She knew how to kiss, and the kiss she bestowed upon him in
the park haunted him just as did the kiss he had received whether he
would or not on the night when she sheltered him in her house.

Thus it came about that the despondent young man was torn between
varying emotions, and by the time he was within hail of Grub Street he
was without will of his own and at the mercy of any who chose to
exercise influence over him.

Chance led him to encounter a party of boon companions whose company he
had vowed to relinquish. One of these was in funds, having abandoned
political pamphleteering for the writing of biographies of notorious
personages, both men and women--the latter preferably--in which truth
and fiction were audaciously blended, and the whole dashed with
scandalous anecdotes which found for such stuff a ready sale.

Jarvis and his friends having had their fill of liquor at one tavern,
were proceeding to another when they met Lancelot Vane, and they bore
him away without much protest. It was by no means the first time that
Vane had drowned his sorrows in drink.

Meanwhile Rofflash was on the prowl. He was not unacquainted with some
of the Grub Street scribblers. One man he had employed three or four
years b