appointed, the Chevalier made
his appearance once more at Altamont's hotel at Baymouth, with the sum
of money required. Altamont was a gentleman, he said, and behaved as
such; he paid his bill at the Inn, and the Baymouth paper announced his
departure on a foreign tour. Strong saw him embark at Dover. "It must
be forgery at the very least," he thought, "that has put Clavering into
this fellow's power, and the Colonel has got the bill."

Before the year was out, however, this happy country saw the Colonel
once more upon its shores. A confounded run on the red had finished
him, he said, at Baden Baden: no gentleman could stand against a colour
coming up fourteen times. He had been obliged to draw upon Sir Francis
Clavering for means of returning home: and Clavering, though pressed for
money (for he had election expenses, had set up his establishment in the
country and was engaged in furnishing his London house), yet found means
to accept Colonel Altamont's bill, though evidently very much against
his will; for in Strong's hearing, Sir Francis wished to heaven, with
many curses, that the Colonel could have been locked up in a debtor's
goal in Germany for life, so that he might never be troubled again.

These sums for the Colonel Sir Francis was obliged to raise without the
knowledge of his wife; for though perfectly liberal, nay, sumptuous in
her expenditure, the good lady had inherited a tolerable aptitude for
business along with the large fortune of her father, Snell, and gave
to her husband only such a handsome allowance as she thought befitted
a gentleman of his rank. Now and again she would give him a present,
or pay an outstanding gambling debt; but she always exacted a pretty
accurate account of the moneys so required; and respecting the subsidies
to the Colonel, Clavering fairly told Strong that he couldn't speak to
his wife.

Part of Mr. Strong's business in life was to procure this money and
other sums, for his patron. And in the Chevalier's apartments, in
Shepherd's Inn, many negotiations took place between gentlemen of the
moneyed world and Sir Francis Clavering, and many valuable bank-notes
and pieces of stamped paper were passed between them. When a man has
been in the habit of getting in debt from his early youth, and of
exchanging his promises to pay at twelve months against present sums
of money, it would seem as if no piece of good fortune ever permanently
benefited him: a little while after the advent