hat in wasting that fortune I may have wronged
you. Enough: you have now before you the two options, much as you had
at first; but you have at present more experience to aid you in your
choice. You are a man, and with more brains than most men; think over it
well, and decide for yourself. Now to bed, and postpone thought till the
morrow. Poor Randal, you look pale!"

Audley, as he said the last words, put his hand on Randal's shoulder,
almost with a father's gentleness; and then suddenly drawing himself
up, as the hard inflexible expression, stamped on that face by years,
returned, he moved away and resettled to Public Life and the iron box.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Early the next day Randal Leslie was in the luxurious business-room
of Baron Levy. How unlike the cold Doric simplicity of the statesman's
library! Axminster carpets, three inches thick; portieres a la Francaise
before the doors; Parisian bronzes on the chimney-piece; and all the
receptacles that lined the room, and contained title-deeds and postobits
and bills and promises to pay and lawyer-like japan boxes, with many
a noble name written thereon in large white capitals--"making ruin
pompous," all these sepulchres of departed patrimonies veneered in
rosewood that gleamed with French polish, and blazed with ormulu. There
was a coquetry, an air of petit maitre, so diffused over the whole
room, that you could not, for the life of you, recollect you were with a
usurer! Plutus wore the aspect of his enemy Cupid; and how realize your
idea of Harpagon in that baron, with his easy French "Mon cher," and
his white, warm hands that pressed yours so genially, and his dress so
exquisite, even at the earliest morn? No man ever yet saw that baron in
a dressing-gown and slippers! As one fancies some feudal baron of old
(not half so terrible) everlastingly clad in mail, so all one's notions
of this grand marauder of civilization were inseparably associated with
varnished boots and a camellia in the button-hole.

"And this is all that he does for you!" cried the baron, pressing
together the points of his ten taper fingers. "Had he but let you
conclude your career at Oxford, I have heard enough of your scholarship
to know that you would have taken high honours, been secure of a
fellowship, have betaken yourself with content to a slow and laborious
profession, and prepared yourself to die on the woolsack."

"He proposes to me now to return to Oxford," said Randal. "It is no