ber. And no man in town knew better that he should lose
them all if he were once known to be in want of their money. Mortified,
harassed, tortured, shunning Harley, yet ever sought by him, fearful of
each knock at his door, Audley Egerton escaped to the mortgaged remnant
of his paternal estate, on which there was a gloomy manor-house, long
uninhabited, and there applied a mind, afterwards renowned for its quick
comprehension of business, to the investigation of his affairs, with a
view to save some wreck from the flood that swelled momently around him.

And now--to condense as much as possible a record that runs darkly on
into pain and sorrow--now Levy began to practise his vindictive arts;
and the arts gradually prevailed. On pretence of assisting Egerton in
the arrangement of his affairs, which he secretly contrived, however,
still more to complicate, he came down frequently to Egerton Hall for
a few hours, arriving by the mail, and watching the effect which Nora's
almost daily letters produced on the bridegroom, irritated by the
practical cares of life. He was thus constantly at hand to instil into
the mind of the ambitious man a regret for the imprudence of hasty
passion, or to embitter the remorse which Audley felt for his treachery
to L'Estrange. Thus ever bringing before the mind of the harassed debtor
images at war with love, and with the poetry of life, he disattuned it
(so to speak) for the reception of Nora's letters, all musical as they
were with such thoughts as the most delicate fancy inspires to the
most earnest love. Egerton was one of those men who never confide their
affairs frankly to women. Nora, when she thus wrote, was wholly in
the dark as to the extent of his stern prosaic distress. And so--and
so--Levy always near--type of the prose of life in its most cynic
form--so by degrees all that redundant affluence of affection, with its
gushes of grief for his absence, prayers for his return, sweet reproach
if a post failed to bring back an answer to the woman's yearning
sighs,--all this grew, to the sensible, positive man of real life,
like sickly romantic exaggeration. The bright arrows shot too high into
heaven to hit the mark set so near to the earth. Ah, common fate of all
superior natures! What treasure, and how wildly wasted! "By-the-by,"
said Levy, one morning, as he was about to take leave of Audley
and return to town,--"by-the-by, I shall be this evening in the
neighbourhood of Mrs. Egerton."