the power that the money-lender never loses over the man that
has owed, owes, or may owe again. Levy was ever urging him to propose,
to the rich Miss Leslie; Lady Lansmere, willing to atone, as she
thought, for his domestic loss, urged the same; Harley, influenced by
his mother, wrote from the Continent to the same effect.

"Manage it as you will," at last said Egerton to Levy, "so that I am not
a wife's pensioner."

"Propose for me, if you will," he said to Lady Lansmere,--"I cannot
woo,--I cannot talk of love."

Somehow or other the marriage, with all its rich advantages to the
ruined gentleman, was thus made up. And Egerton, as we have seen, was
the polite and dignified husband before the world,--married to a woman
who adored him. It is the common fate of men like him to be loved too
well!

On her death-bed his heart was touched by his wife's melancholy
reproach,--"Nothing I could do has ever made you love me!"

"It is true," answered Audley, with tears in his voice and eyes; "Nature
gave me but a small fund of what women like you call 'love,' and I
lavished it all away." And he then told her, though with reserve, some
portion of his former history; and that soothed her; for when she saw
that he had loved, and could grieve, she caught a glimpse of the human
heart she had not seen before. She died, forgiving him, and blessing.

Audley's spirits were much affected by this new loss. He inly resolved
never to marry again. He had a vague thought at first of retrenching his
expenditure, and making young Randal Leslie his heir. But when he first
saw the clever Eton boy, his feelings did not warm to him, though his
intellect appreciated Randal's quick, keen talents. He contented himself
with resolving to push the boy,--to do what was merely just to the
distant kinsman of his late wife. Always careless and lavish in money
matters, generous and princely, not from the delight of serving others,
but from a grand seigneur's sentiment of what was due to himself and his
station, Audley had a mournful excuse for the lordly waste of the large
fortune at his control. The morbid functions of the heart had become
organic disease. True, he might live many years, and die at last of some
other complaint in the course of nature; but the progress of the disease
would quicken with all emotional excitement; he might die suddenly--any
day--in the very prime, and, seemingly, in the full vigour, of his
life. And the only physician in whom h