gust of Mr. Nebuchadnezzar Barneywinkle, whose pleasure and profit it was to supply vinous and alcoholic beverages from his own cellars to the lambs in his fold; but who found consolation in taking toll on the Captain's wine, at so much per cork, as it passed through his grated wicket. Also, there were plenty of young men, with the longest of legs and of moustaches, and the largest of whiskers, who were glad to come and sit with Willy Goldthorpe during the permitted hours,-to abuse his creditors, to cheer him up, to recount to him the latest sporting intelligence fresh from Bell's Life, to smoke and drink, and occasionally take a friendly hand at loo or vingt'un with him. All this certainly made a sunshine in the very shady place of Cursitor Street; but wine and cigars and cards, and the odds on the Leger, won't pay two-andtwenty thousand pounds worth of debt. Jack Butts told Willy so plainly. Jack Butts was always saying cruel things, and doing kind actions. He owed more money than any man of his means (which were nil) in London. His creditors despaired of, but were fond of him. "What's the good of suing Captain Jack?" such a one would urge; "he's stood godfather to all the sheriff's officers' children, and they always turn the blind side to him when he passes.' When Jack Butts went to a billdiscounter with a piece of stamped paper for negotiation, the usurer would say, "No, Jack; we've had quite enough of your blessed signature at three months; but if you want a ten-pun' note in a friendly way, here it is, and welcome." "He owes me a cool hundred, the capting does," observed Mr. Chevron, tailor of New Burlington Street; "but if he'd only promise to drop in sometimes of a Sunday, and take a bit of dinner on the quiet at my little place at Forest Hill, I'd write his name off my ledger to-morrow. That man's conversation over a bottle of the right sort is worth forty shillings in the pound alone." Jack Butts was a man of the world, and could give good advice to any body but himself.

"It's a bad job, Willy," he remarked in Cursitor Street, "and no mistake, and it can't be squared. The Philistines have made you sing comic songs at three months' date quite long enough, my boy; and it's time to pull Stamp Castle down upon their heads. You've gone to smash, and your governor's gone to smash, and except that Basinghall Street lies to the east of Temple Bar, and Portugal Street to the west, I don't see much difference between the two. You must go over to the Bench, old fellow, and order a pail of whitewash. As you owe such a precious lot, I don't think it will go very hard with you. If y you were a poor devil owing a couple of hundred or so, you'd be sure to be remanded for six months. You'd have to stand the Commissioner's bullying. I've stood it. It didn't turn my hair gray. It isn't so bad as a wigging from the Chief on a field-day. And then you'll come out as clean as a new pin; and we must set you up as a 'vet.,' or a commission-agent, or a riding-master at Brighton, or a billiard-marker, or something genteel and easy in that line; and if you want a fiver towards helping you to file your schedule,

you've only to say the word to Jack Butts, and if he can't beg it, he'll borrow it; and if he can't borrow it, he'll steal it."

These were not, perhaps, the words of strict morality, but they were decidedly the words of worldly wisdom, and William Goldthorpe did not fail to lay them well to heart. It would have been well, perhaps, for the forlorn circle in Praed Street, Paddington, if they had found comforters as practical. But they had none. Sir Jasper had ever been a shy and reticent man, and those whom he had shunned in his prosperity shunned him now in his adversity. With the polite world the family had clearly nothing more to do. The polite portals were closed against them, even if they had chosen to knock thereat, and they were ostracised in perpetuity from the sacred precincts. This was truly hard, but perhaps necessary, and certainly salutary. Not that they were entirely destitute of friends. Some old clients to whom Mammon had been generous from his abundant store, some old servants who remembered what good living, and what comfortable quarters they had enjoyed in the old time, were anxious to do their former master and mistress such services as lay in their power. Gratitude is not quite dead in the world; if it were, it would be as well for us to go and live in a pit full of devils.

Lady Goldthorpe "bore up"-she used the expression herself-far better than had been expected. Perhaps it was that the good woman found herself once more in an element familiar, and, to a certain extent, comfortable to her. She fretted little; she repined not at all. She was cheerful. She called her husband "Goldie," as in the old days, and strove to cheer him up. She cooked him nice little dishes, and tried to persuade him to take suppers, and something warm after it.

"There's nothing like supper," said simple Lady Goldthorpe, "for a wounded heart. Don't you remember what nice little suppers we used to have, years and years ago, when we were in those little difficulties about Mr. D.? Poor Mr. D., I wonder what became of him! Do have a rump-steak and kidney pudding at ten, Goldie."

The Baronet shuddered at the word "difficulties." "They exist still, Maria," he remarked gloomily.

"Oh, nonsense!" Lady Goldthorpe continued, "that botheration of a bankruptcy can't last for ever. Why, wasn't Pybus, in our town, bankrupt over and over again, and didn't he always get over it? He always seemed to be better off after he had failed for a good lot. You can pay something in the pound, can't you, Goldie?"

"I don't know: perhaps I may; perhaps not a penny."

"Well, if you can't, you can't-that's positive. Blood can't be got out of a stone. They can't hang you, Goldie, for being unfortunate." "No; but they can-"

"What?"

"Never mind what," Sir Jasper cried, in an agonising voice. "They can do that to me which would bring ruin-utter ruin-on me, and disgrace on all our children.”

"Ruin and disgrace!"

"Yes, Maria. There is one dreadful secret I have never confided to you, to you, my own true wife, the companion of my early poverty, and in whose bosom I have reposed all my cares and troubles,—all but this terrible one, which now hangs over me and threatens to crush me."

"Jasper Goldthorpe," his wife said, with something like dignity in her homely way," to me you have always been a good and faithful husband; to me you have always acted as an honest man. Why should I think that you would do the thing that isn't right to others? When one's a rogue at home, one's generally a rogue abroad. Come, now, Goldie dear, tell me what it's all about."

"I cannot, I dare not, Maria. I should blush to do so. I tremble to speak about the awful thing, for fear that the very walls might have ears."

"Walls have ears, Sir Jasper," a voice close behind the Baronet said; "and so have people behind parlour-doors; and pretty sharp ones too." The voice belonged to Filoe and Co., of Coger's Inn; the voice belonged to Mr. Sims, of London, Paris, and the World generally. And Mr. Sims had knocked a soft rat-tat at the street-door, while the bankrupt baronet and his wife were in conversation,-Magdalen was away-gone in quest of work, she had said, in her proud way, and after a brief parley on the door-mat, ending with his slipping a five-shilling piece into the landlady's hand,-a great outlay for the usually economical Mr. Sims,he had been permitted to remain in ambush for a few minutes in the narrow little passage; had doubtless-thanks to a flimsy lodging-house parlour-door and his sharp ears-heard the concluding part of the colloquy between Sir Jasper and Lady Goldthorpe, and now entered the room, cool, confident, and suggestive of no science being to him a mystery.

But when Lady Goldthorpe turned round at the entrance of the unexpected visitor, it was not as Mr. Sims or as Mr. Filoe that she addressed him. She stared at him in blank amazement; she suppressed a rising shriek, and lifting up her hands, and sinking into her chair, the good woman murmured, "Hugh Desborough, my husband's old partner, by all that's wonderful!"

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE AGONY OF FLORENCE ARMYTAGE: STAGE THE FIRST.

A BRIGHT day in Paris is, perhaps, the brightest that can be seen any where in the world; and it was the brightest, the sunniest, and the cheeriest that Lutetia had known for many months-this June morning. It was so bright that the sun turned the crooks of the rag-pickers into gold, and tipped with silver the strips of iron, and fragments of saucepanlids, and nails, and boot-heels twinkling in their baskets. 'It was so bright that the Morgue, that gruesome dead-house, looked quite classical and picturesque, a little temple of antiquity, with the ashes of dead heroes

inside, instead of a dank and dismal charnel-place, where the livid corpses lie on the stone slabs, a wonder and a horror to the sight-seers. It was so bright that the bayonets of a regiment of infantry marching down the Rue de Rivoli flashed and glittered in the sunlight like a cheveaux-defrise of diamonds. Of course the nursemaids in the Palais Royal, and the plump Normandy nurses outside the Café de Paris, took advantage of the occasion to hire chairs at two sous an hour, and sun themselves, with their young charges, to the admiration of all passers-by, especially the redlegged warriors attached to the garrison at Paris. Of course the little girls in the great quadrangle of the Palace aforesaid, and in the Tuileries Gardens, those wonderful little Parisian children, with scragged-up hair, vandyked trousers, black-silk pinafores, who are coquettes in their cradles, and flirts in their leading-strings, avail themselves of the sunshine to indulge in more than ordinarily graceful and elaborate gymnastic exercises as connected with the skipping-rope. Of course while they skipped they looked round for the customary murmur of applause never denied, and quite as gratifying to their little eyes and ears, whether it proceeded from the toothless old gentlemen sipping their morning coffee, and reading their tiny rags of newspapers outside the Café de la Rotonde, or from the ingenuous provincials in blouses, sabots, and red-tasselled nightcaps, who were loitering about to see the Guard paraded, and the sundial cannon fired by Phoebus' rays at high noon. It was so bright and sunny, that the five hundred thousand ladies and gentlemen who have nothing to do in Paris all the year round began to do it with all their minds and with all their strength, that the rattling of dominoes, the clinking of glasses, the clattering of billiard-cues, the shuffling of cards, began to be heard an hour earlier than usual,-and that the fumes of prematurely matutinal cigars curled blue in the morning sunshine from at least two hundred and fifty thousand pairs of happy idle lips. It was so bright and sunny, that you forgot the beggars, with their rags and their sores, on the Parvis Notre-Dame, and the steps of St. Roche (ye beggars, ye have been swept away under the Imperial dispensation !),—that you forgot the gutters, and the discordant cries of the old-clothes men, and the dust and ashes which the house-porters persisted in sweeping over your clean boots,-that you forgot there was a great deal of want, and a great deal of misery, and a great deal of vice, a great deal of crime, in this teeming city of Paris. Sol lucet omnibus. The sun made amends for all. The sun made the beggar rich, and bade the cripple forget his hurts, and the paralytic that he was bed-ridden, and the debtor that he was in Clichy, and the pickpocket that the spies were on his track, and the gamin that his dinner was problema tical, and the sempstress that she was making shirts for forty sous a dozen. The sun was meat to the famished, and drink to those who were athirst, and lodging to the houseless. So it must have been in all times, I fancy, in this wonderful city, whose dark shadows only looked the blacker by the dazzling sunshine which contrasts with them. There must have been sunny mornings during the Reign of Terror, when Robespierre enjoyed

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his breakfast and Fouquier-Tinville smiled, when the procession of the tumbrils down the Rue St.-Honoré must have looked quite a glittering pageant; and the sun must have shone so on the red guillotine, on the Place of the Revolution, that you could scarcely distinguish it from a galante show in the neighbouring Elysian fields.

Sol lucet omnibus. Every where the sun shone, and for all;-for the Ministers of the Republic in their cabinets; for the students in the taverns and coffee-houses of the Latin Quarter; for the grisettes in their garrets, the soldiers in their barracks, the mountebanks in their booths, the great dames of the Faubourg St.-Germains in their boudoirs, the artisans in their workrooms, the cobblers and umbrella-menders in their underground cabins. The sun brought many innocent youths, between the ages of six and twelve, in the divers schools and colleges at Paris, to grief, prompting them as it did to catch its rays in burning-glasses, and so perforate copy-books supplied to them by their pastors and masters. Yes, the sun shone in all places and for all, save in the tomb and for its inmates. There all was dark enough as usual. In two notable places it shone this morning in the month of June. First, it streamed gallantly and defiantly into a splendid suite of rooms in the Rue Grandedes-Petites-Maisons, and through a stained casement into a sumptuous little boudoir, and upon a man lolling on a luxurious ottoman, and who was dressed to all substantial seeming in plain burgess's apparel, but who figuratively, and curiously enough, wore his heart upon his sleeve.

Our old friend Simon Lefranc ! the genial, airy, volatile child of Gaul (was he a child of Gaul?); the ex-commercial traveller in the corsettrade; the ex-denizen of the Monmouth Chambers, Soho; the ex-paillasse who had looked through the coffee-room window; the ex-dandy who had met with Inspector Millament and Sergeant South on the Bridge of Waterloo; the ex-Count Somebody, in curly black wig, who had been so welcome a guest at the entertainment of the Baroness Dela Haute Gueuse; the present Papa Lallouet;-Simon Lefranc, call him what you will.

Simon was quite at home, a man of the world; and in it he could accommodate himself to any circumstances in life; but the present were, to tell truth, somewhat snug, somewhat cozy, not to say luxurious circumstances. Simon never exceeded, he was too wary for that, but he certainly enjoyed himself thoroughly. A nice succulent little breakfast was laid out before him. The remains of some truffled turkey, the crust of a slice of Strasbourg pie, the bones of some cutlets, some oyster-shells warranted Ostend, a champagne-cork, and the lees of a right good bottle of Chambertin, showed that he had known during the last half-hour how to appreciate the good things of this life. And now Simon's demie tasse, and Simon's petite verre, had been brought him by an obsequious bonne; and Simon himself, producing from his cigarcase a lengthy and fragrant Trabuco, did not look, as he sipped and he puffed the goods with which the gods had provided him, in the least like