endthrift
_litterateur_, who had passed the greater part of his career within the
rules of the King's Bench; that he had run away from home at the age of
fifteen, and had tried his fortune in all those professions which
require no educational ordeal, and which seem to offer themselves
invitingly to the scapegrace and adventurer. At fifteen Valentine
Hawkehurst had been errand-boy in a newspaper office; at seventeen a
penny-a-liner, whose flimsy was pretty sure of admission in the lower
class of Sunday papers. In the course of a very brief career he had
been a provincial actor, a _manege_ rider in a circus, a
billiard-marker, and a betting agent. It was after having exhausted
these liberal professions that he encountered Captain Paget.

Such was the man whom Horatio Paget admitted to companionship with his
only daughter. It can scarcely be pleaded in excuse for the Captain
that he might have admitted a worse man than Valentine Hawkehurst to
his family circle, for the Captain had never taken the trouble to sound
the depths of his coadjutor's nature. There is nothing so short-sighted
as selfishness; and beyond the narrow circle immediately surrounding
himself, there was no man more blind than Horatio Paget.

* * * * *

It was dusk when Diana grew tired of the lonely pathways among the
hills, where the harmonies of a band stationed in the valley were
wafted in gusts of music by the fitful summer breeze. The loneliness of
the place soothed the girl's feverish spirits; and, seated in a little
classic temple upon the summit of a hill, she looked pensively downward
through the purple mists at the newly-lighted lamps twinkling faintly
in the valley.

"One does not feel the sting of one's shabbiness here," thought Miss
Paget: "the trees are all dressed alike. Nature makes no distinction.
It is only Fortune who treats her children unfairly."

The Captain's daughter walked slowly back to the little town in the
deepening dusk. The lodging occupied by Horatio Paget and his household
consisted of four roomy chambers on the second story of a big rambling
house. The rooms were meanly furnished, and decorated with the tawdry
ornamentation dear to the continental mind; but there were long wide
windows and an iron balcony, on which Diana Paget was often pleased to
sit.

She found the sitting-room dark and empty. No dinner had been prepared;
for on lucky days the Captain and his _protege_ were wont to d