orribly painful to answer, the taunts that would torture her poor
sorrowful heart.

Alas for her brief dream of love and happiness! Alas for her foolish
worship of the gentleman lodger! She knew now that her mother had been
wiser than herself, and that it would have been better for her if she
had renounced the shadowy glory of an alliance with Horatio Cromie
Nugent Paget, whose string of high-sounding names, written on the cover
of an old wine-book, had not been without its influence on the ignorant
girl. The widow's daughter knew very little happiness during the few
years of her wedded life. To be hurried from place to place; to dine in
Mayfair to-day, and to eat your dinner at a shilling ordinary in
Whitecross-street to-morrow; to wear fine clothes that have not been
paid for, and to take them off your back at a moment's notice when they
are required for the security of the friendly pawnbroker; to know that
your life is a falsehood and a snare, and that to leave a place is to
leave contempt and execration behind you,--these things constitute the
burden of a woman whose husband lives by his wits. And over and above
these miseries, Mrs. Paget had to endure all the variations of temper
to which the schemer is subject. If the pigeons dropped readily into
the snare, and if their plumage proved well worth the picking, the
Captain was very kind to his wife, after his own fashion; that is to
say, he took her out with him, and after lecturing her angrily because
of the shabbiness of her bonnet, bought her a new one, and gave her a
dinner that made her ill, and then sent her home in a cab, while he
finished the evening in more congenial society. But if the times were
bad for the vulture tribe--O, then, what a gloomy companion for the
domestic hearth was the elegant Horatio! After smiling his false smile
all day, while rage and disappointment were gnawing at his heart, it
was a kind of relief to the Captain to be moody and savage by his own
fireside. The human vulture has something of the ferocity of his
feathered prototype. The man who lives upon his fellow-men has need to
harden his heart; for one sentiment of compassion, one touch of human
pity, would shatter his finest scheme in the hour of its fruition.
Horatio Paget and compassion parted fellowship very early in the course
of his unscrupulous career. What if the pigeon has a widowed mother
dependent on his prosperity, or half a dozen children who will be
involved in his ru