ose he loves money, he would give up half his
fortune rather than do anything for which we could cut him. He allows a
pension of three hundred a year to Lord S-----. True; he was his man of
business for twenty years, and before then S----- was rather a prudent
fellow, and had fifteen thousand a year. He has helped on, too, many
a clever young man,--the best borough-monger you ever knew. He likes
having friends in parliament. In fact, of course he is a rogue; but if
one wants a rogue, one can't find a pleasanter. I should like to see him
on the French stage,--a prosperous Macaire; Le Maitre could hit him off
to the life."

From information in these more fashionable quarters, gleaned with his
usual tact, Randal turned to a source less elevated, but to which he
attached more importance. Dick Avenel associated with the baron,--Dick
Avenel must be in his clutches. Now Randal did justice to that
gentleman's practical shrewdness. Moreover, Avenel was by profession a
man of business. He must know more of Levy than these men of pleasure
could; and as he was a plain-spoken person, and evidently honest, in the
ordinary acceptation of the word, Randal did not doubt that out of Dick
Avenel he should get the truth.

On arriving in Eaton Square, and asking for Mr. Avenel, Randal was at
once ushered into the drawing-room. The apartment was not in such
good, solid, mercantile taste as had characterized Avenel's more humble
bachelor's residence at Screwstown. The taste now was the Honourable
Mrs. Avenel's; and, truth to say, no taste could be worse. Furniture
of all epochs heterogeneously clumped together,--here a sofa a la
renaissance in Gobelin; there a rosewood Console from Gillow; a tall
mock-Elizabethan chair in black oak, by the side of a modern Florentine
table of Mosaic marbles; all kinds of colours in the room, and all at
war with each other; very bad copies of the best-known pictures in the
world in the most gaudy frames, and impudently labelled by the names of
their murdered originals,--"Raphael," "Corregio," "Titian," "Sebastian
del Piombo." Nevertheless, there had been plenty of money spent, and
there was plenty to show for it. Mrs. Avenel was seated on her sofa a la
renaissance, with one of her children at her feet, who was employed
in reading a new Annual in crimson silk binding. Mrs. Avenel was in an
attitude as if sitting for her portrait.

Polite society is most capricious in its adoptions or rejections. You
see many