re him a
share in this lucrative purchase, Mr. Darrell could accommodate him
for a year with a loan of L2,000 or L3,000, he sanguinely calculated on
attaining so high a position in the commercial world as, though it
could not render the recollection of his alliance more obtrusive to Mr.
Darrell, would render it less humiliating."

Mr. Gotobed, in obedience to the peremptory instructions he had received
from his client, did not refer this letter to Darrell, but having
occasion at that time to visit Paris on other business, he resolved
(without calling on Mr. Hammond) to institute there some private
inquiry--into that rising trader's prospects and status. He found, on
arrival at Paris, these inquiries difficult. No one in either the _beau
monde_ or in the _haut commerce_ seemed to know anything about this Mr.
Jasper Hammond. A few fashionable English _roues_ remembered to have
seen, once or twice during Matilda's life, and shortly after her
decease, a very fine-looking man shooting meteoric across some equivocal
_salons_, or lounging in the Champs Elysees, or dining at the Cafe de
Paris; but of late that meteor had vanished. Mr. Gotobed, then anxiously
employing a commissioner to gain some information of Mr. Hammond's
firm at the private residence from which Jasper addressed his letter,
ascertained that in that private residence Jasper did not reside. He
paid the porter to receive occasional letters, for which he called
or sent; and the porter, who was evidently a faithful and discreet
functionary, declared his belief that Monsieur Hammond lodged in the
house in which he transacted business, though where was the house or
what was the business, the porter observed, with well-bred implied
rebuke, "Monsieur Hammond was too reserved to communicate, he himself
too incurious to inquire." At length, Mr. Gotobed's business, which was,
in fact, a commission from a distressed father to extricate an imprudent
son, a mere boy, from some unhappy associations, having brought him into
the necessity of seeing persons who belonged neither to the _beau monde_
nor to the _haut commerce_, he gleaned from them the information he
desired. Mr. Hammond lived in the very heart of a certain circle in
Paris, which but few Englishmen ever penetrate. In that circle Mr.
Hammond had, on receiving his late wife's dowry, become the partner in a
private gambling hell; in that hell had been engulfed all the monies he
had received--a hell that ought to have