s an improvident
scoundrel, and did not leave me five hundred a year. I wonder what I
should have been like, by the bye, if I had been blest with five
hundred a year?"

"Honest and happy," answered the girl earnestly. She forgot her
simulated indifference, and looked at him with sad earnest eyes. He met
the glance, and the expression of his own face changed from its cynical
smile to a thoughtful sadness.

"Honest perhaps; and yet I almost doubt if anything under five thousand
a year would have kept me honest. Decidedly not happy; the men who can
be happy on five hundred a year are made of a duller stuff than the
clay which serves for a Hawkehurst."

"You talk about not being happy with five hundred a year!" Diana
exclaimed impatiently. "Surely any decent existence would be happiness
to you compared to the miserable life you lead,--the shameful, degraded
life which shuts you out of the society of respectable people and
reduces you to the level of a thief. If you had any pride, Valentine,
you would feel it as bitterly as I do."

"But I haven't any pride. As for my life,--well, I suppose it is
shameful and degraded, and I know that it's often miserable; but it
suits me better than jog-trot respectability, I can dine one day on
truffled turkey and champagne, another day upon bread and cheese and
small beer; but I couldn't eat beef and mutton always. That's what
kills people of my temperament. There are born scamps in the world,
Diana, and I am one of them. My name is Robert Macaire, and I was
created for the life I lead. Keep clear of me if you have any hankering
after better things; but don't try to change my nature, for it is
wasted labour."

"Valentine, it is so cruel of you to talk like that."

"Cruel to whom?"

"To--those--who care for you."

It was quite dark now; but even in the darkness Diana Paget's head
drooped a little as she said this. Mr. Hawkehurst laughed aloud.

"Those who care for me!" he cried; "no such people ever lived. My
father was a drunken scoundrel, who suffered his children to grow up
about him as he would have suffered a litter of puppies to sprawl upon
his hearth, only because there was less trouble in letting them lie
there than in kicking them out. My mother was a good woman in the
beginning, I know; but she must have been something more than a mortal
woman if she had not lost some of her goodness in twelve years of such
a life as she led with my father. I believe she was fond of me