to beggar
me,--that is not the kind of love which makes the world go round!"

Scandalised to the last nerve of his respectable system by the
information thus gleaned, Mr. Gotobed returned to London. More letters
from Jasper--becoming urgent, and at last even insolent--Mr. Gotobed
worried into a reply, wrote back shortly "that he could not even
communicate such applications to Mr. Darrell, and that he must
peremptorily decline all further intercourse, epistolary or personal,
with Mr. Hammond."

Darrell, on returning from one of the occasional rambles on the
Continent, "remote, unfriended, melancholy," by which he broke the
monotony of his Fawley life, found a letter from Jasper, not fawning,
but abrupt, addressed to himself, complaining of Mr. Gotobed's improper
tone, requesting pecuniary assistance, and intimating that he could in
return communicate to Mr. Darrell an intelligence that would give him
more joy than all his wealth could purchase. Darrell enclosed that
note to Mr. Gotobed; Mr. Gotobed came down to Fawley to make those
revelations of Jasper's mode of life which were too delicate--or too
much the reverse of delicate--to commit to paper. Great as Darrell's
disgust at the memory of Jasper had hitherto been, it may well be
'conceived how much more bitter became that memory now. No answer was,
of course, vouchsafed to Jasper, who, after another extremely forcible
appeal for money, and equally enigmatical boast of the pleasurable
information it was in his power to bestow, relapsed into sullen silence.

One day, somewhat more than five years after Matilda's death, Darrell,
coming in from his musing walks, found a stranger waiting for him.
This stranger was William Losely, returned from penal exile; and while
Darrell, on hearing this announcement, stood mute with haughty wonder
that such a visitor could cross the threshold of his father's house,
the convict began what seemed to Darrell a story equally audacious
and incomprehensible--the infant Matilda had borne to Jasper, and the
certificates of whose death had been so ceremoniously produced and so
prudently attested, lived still! Sent out to nurse as soon as born, the
nurse had in her charge another babe, and this last was the child who
had died and been buried as Matilda Hammond's. The elder Losely went
on to stammer out a hope that his son was not at the time aware of the
fraudulent exchange, but had been deceived by the nurse--that it had not
been a premedit