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468 pects," he said, "fairer than they had ever been." Under the name of Hammond, as an independent gentleman, he had made friends more powerful than he could ever have made under the name of Losely as a city clerk. He blushed to think he had ever been a city clerk. No doubt he should get into some Government office; and then, oh then, with assured income, and the certainty to rise, he might claim the longed-for hand of the "best of creatures."

On Arabella's part, she hastily explained her present position. She was governess to Miss Darrell—that was Miss Darrell. Arabella must not leave her walking on by herself—she would write to him. Addresses were exchanged—Jasper gave a very neat card—"Mr. Hammond, No., Duke Street, St. James's."

Arabella, with a beating heart, hastened to join her friend. At the rapid glance she had taken of her perfidious lover, she thought him, if possible, improved. His dress, always studied, was more to the fashion of polished society, more simply correct—his air more decided. Altogether he looked prosperous, and his manner had never been more seductive, in its mixture of easy self-confidence and hypocritical coaxing. In fact, Jasper had not been long in the French commercial house—to which he had been sent out of the way while his father's trial was proceeding and the shame of it fresh—before certain licenses of conduct had resulted in his dismissal. But, meanwhile, he had made many friends among young men of his own age—those loose wild viveurs who, without doing any thing the law can punish as dishonest, contrive for a few fast years to live very showily on their wits. In that strange social fermentation which still prevails in a country where an aristocracy of birth, exceedingly impoverished, and exceedingly numerous so far as the right to prefix a De to the name, or to stamp a coronet on the card, can constitute an aristocrat—is diffused among an ambitious, adventurous, restless, and not inelegant young democracy—each cemented with the other by that fiction of law called égalité; in that yet unsettled and struggling society in which so much of the old has been irretrievably destroyed, and so little of the new has been solidly constructed—there are much greater varieties, infinitely more subtle grades and distinctions, in the region of life which lies between respectability and disgrace, that can be found in a country like ours. The French novels and dramas may apply less a mirror than a magnifying glass to the beings that move through that region. But still those French novels and dramas do not unfaithfully represent the classifications of which they exaggerate the types. Those strange combinations, into one tab-