him, "but to think that I have landed you here, that this is my return
for your sacrifice."

"Hoots! How was ye to foresee Mr. Manners was a blellum?" And he broke
into threats which, if Mr. Marmaduke had heard and comprehended, would
have driven him into the seventh state of fear. "Have you no other
friends in London?" he asked, regaining his English.

I shook my head. Then came--a question I dreaded.

"And Mr. Manners's family?"

"I would rather remain here for life," I said, "than to them now."

For pride is often selfish, my dears, and I did not reflect that if I
remained, the captain would remain likewise.

"Are they all like Mr. Manners?"

"That they are not," I returned with more heat than was necessary; "his
wife is goodness itself, and his daughter--" Words failed me, and I
reddened.

"Ah, he has a daughter, you say," said the captain, casting a significant
look at me and beginning to pace the little room. He was keener than I
thought, this John Paul.

If it were not so painful a task, my dears, I would give you here some
notion of what a London sponging-house was in the last century. Comyn
has heard me tell of it, and I have seen Bess cry over the story. Gaming
was the king-vice of that age, and it filled these places to overflowing.
Heaven help a man who came into the world with that propensity in the
early days of King George the Third. Many, alas, acquired it before they
were come to years of discretion. Next me, at the long table where we
were all thrown in together,--all who could not pay for private meals,
--sat a poor fellow who had flung away a patrimony of three thousand a
year. Another had even mortgaged to a Jew his prospects on the death of
his mother, and had been seized by the bailiffs outside of St. James's
palace, coming to Castle Yard direct from his Majesty's levee. Yet
another, with such a look of dead hope in his eyes as haunts me yet,
would talk to us by the hour of the Devonshire house where he was born,
of the green valley and the peaceful stream, and of the old tower-room,
caressed by trees, where Queen Bess had once lain under the carved oak
rafters. Here he had taken his young wife, and they used to sit
together, so he said, in the sunny oriel over the water, and he had sworn
to give up the cards. That was but three years since, and then all had
gone across the green cloth in one mad night in St. James's Street.
Their friends had deserted them, and the poor little woman was