eaten up by
debenture-bonds and preference-shares, sir, and will never pay its
original proprietors one sixpence of interest on their capital," with a
great deal more of the same character; and it was quite new to her to
hear about novels, theatres, and bonnets from masculine lips, and to
find that there were men living who could interest themselves in such
frivolities. Charlotte was delighted with Diana's friend. It was she
who encouraged Valentine every now and then by some exclamation of
surprise or expression of interest, while Miss Paget herself was
thoughtful and silent.

It was not thus that she had hoped to meet Valentine Hawkehurst. She
stole a look at him now and then as he walked by her side. Yes, it was
the old face--the face which would have been so handsome if there had
been warmth and life in it, instead of that cold listlessness which
repelled all sympathy, and seemed to constitute a kind of mask behind
which the real man hid himself.

Diana looked at him, and remembered her parting from him in the chill
gray morning on the platform at Foretdechene. He had let her go out
alone into the dreary world to encounter what fate she might, without
any more appearance of anxiety than he might have exhibited had she
been starting for a summer-day's holiday; and now, after a year of
separation, he met her with the same air of unconcern, and could
discourse conventional small talk to another woman while she walked by
his side.

While Mr. Hawkehurst was talking to Mr. Sheldon's stepdaughter, Captain
Paget had contrived to make himself very agreeable to that gentleman
himself. Lord Lytton has said that "there is something strange and
almost mesmerical in the _rapport_ between two evil natures. Bring two
honest men together, and it is ten to one if they recognise each other
as honest; differences in temper, manner, even politics, may make each
misjudge the other. But bring together two men unprincipled and
perverted--men who, if born in a cellar, would have been food for the
hulks or gallows--and they understand each other by instant sympathy."
However this might be with these two men, they had speedily become upon
very easy terms with each other. Mr. Sheldon's plans for the making of
money were very complicated in their nature, and he had frequent need
of clever instruments to assist in the carrying out of his
arrangements. Horatio Paget was the exact type of man most likely to be
useful to such a speculator as Ph