that evening to the service of his old ally.
He performed all friendly offices for the departing Captain, dined with
him very pleasantly in Regent-street, and accompanied him to the
London-bridge terminus, where he beheld the voyager comfortably seated
in a second-class carriage of the night-train for Newhaven.

Mr. Hawkehurst had seen the Captain take a through ticket for Rouen,
and he saw the train leave the terminus. This he held to be ocular
demonstration of the fact that Captain Paget was really going to the
Gallic Manchester.

"That sort of customer is so uncommonly slippery," the young man said
to himself as he left the station; "nothing but the evidence of my own
eyes would have convinced me of my friend's departure. How pure and
fresh the London atmosphere seems now that the perfume of Horatio Paget
is out of it! I wonder what he is going to do at Rouen? Very little
good, I daresay. But why should I wonder about him, or trouble myself
about him? He is gone, and I have set myself free from the trammels of
the past."

* * * * *

The next day was Christmas-day. Mr. Hawkehurst recited scraps of
Milton's glorious hymn as he made his morning toilet. He was very
happy. It was the first Christmas morning on which he had ever awakened
with this sense of supreme happiness, or with the consciousness that
the day was brighter, or grander, or more holy than other days. It
seemed to him to-day, more than ever, that he was indeed a regenerate
creature, purified by the influence of a good woman's love.

He looked back at his past existence, and the vision of many
Christmas-days arose before him: a Christmas in Paris, amidst
unutterable rain and mud; a Christmas-night spent in roaming the
Boulevards, and in the consumption of cognac and tobacco at a
third-rate cafe; a Christmas in Germany; more than one Christmas in the
Queen's Bench; one especially dreary Christmas in a long bare ward at
Whitecross-street,--how many varied scenes and changing faces arose
before his mental vision associated with that festive time! And yet
among them all there was not one on which there shone the faintest
glimmer of that holy light which makes the common holiday a sacred
season.

It was a pleasant thing to breakfast without the society of the
brilliant Horatio, whose brilliancy was apt to appear somewhat ghastly
at that early period of the morning. It was pleasant to loiter over the
meal, now meditating on