some newly discovered silver mines in the
Brazils; and day after day were his careful
scheming, his elaborate plotting, his vivacious
daring, and his consummate knowledge of the
world; rewarded by the steady progress which
the undertaking made. The temporary offices in
Tokenhouse-yard were besieged with inquirers;
good brokers with City names of high standing
offered their services; splendid reports came
from the engineers, who had been sent out to
investigate the state of the mines. Only one
thing was wanting, and that was capital; capital,
by hook or by crook, Mr. Stewart Routh must
have, and was determined to have. If the affair
were to be launched, the brokers said, the next
week must see it done; and the difficulty of
raising the funds for the necessary preliminary
expenses was becoming day by day more and
more palpable and insurmountable to Stewart
Routh.

The interval of time that had witnessed so
much activity on the part of Mr. Stewart Routh,
and had advanced his schemes close to a condition
of imminent crisis, had been productive of
nothing new or remarkable in the existence of
George Dallas. That is to say, on the surface of it.
He was still leading the desultory life of a man
who, with an intellectual and moral nature
capable of better deeds and nobler aspirations,
is incurably weak, impulsive, and swayed by a
love of pleasure; a man incapable of real
self-control, and with whom the gratification of the
present is potent, above all suggestions or
considerations of the contingencies of the future.
He worked a little, and his talent was
beginning to tell on the popularity of the paper
for which he worked, The Mercury, and on
the perceptions of its proprietors. George
Dallas was a man in whose character there were
many contradictions. With much of the
fervour of the poetic temperament, with its
sensuousness and its sensitiveness, he had a certain
nonchalance about him, a fitful indifference to
external things, and a spasmodic impatience of
his surroundings. This latter was apt to come
over him at times when he was apparently
merriest, and it had quite as much to do with his
anxiety to get his debt to Routh discharged, and
to set himself free from Routh, as any moral sense
of the danger of keeping such company, or any
moral consciousness of the waste of his life,
and the deterioration of his character. George
Dallas had no knowledge of the true history of
Routh's career; of the blacker shades of his
character he was entirely ignorant. In his eyes,
Routh was a clever man, and a good-for-nothing,
a "black sheep" like himself, a sheep for whose
blackness Dallas (as he did in his own case)
held circumstances, the white sheep, anything,
and every thing except the man himself, to blame.
He was dimly conscious that his associate was
stronger than he, stronger in will, stronger in
knowledge of men, and somehow, though he
never defined or acknowledged the feeling to
himself, he mistrusted and feared him. He
liked him, too; he felt grateful to him for his
help; he did not discern the interested motives
which actuated him, and, indeed, they were
but small, and would by no means have
accounted for all Routh's proceedings towards
Dallas. Nor is it necessary that they should;
a villain is not, therefore, altogether
precluded from likings, or even the feebler forms
of friendship, and Dallas was not simply silly
and egotistical when he believed that Routh
felt kindly and warmly towards him. Still,
whether a merciful and occult influence was
at work within him, or the tide of his feelings
had been turned by his stolen interview
with his mother, by his being brought into such
positive contact with her life and its conditions,
and having been made to realise the bitterness
he had infused into it, it were vain to
inquire. Whatever his motives, however mixed
their nature or confused their origin, he was
filled, whenever he was out of Routh's presence,
and looked his life in the face, with an ardent
longing to "cut the whole concern," as he
phrased it in his thoughts. And Harriet?
—for the " whole concern" included her, as he
was forced to remember—Harriet, the only
woman whose society he liked—Harriet, whom
he admired with an admiration as pure and
respectful as he could have felt for her, had
he met her in the least equivocal, nay, even
in the most exalted position. Well, he would
be very sorry to lose Harriet, but, after all, she
cared only for Routh; and he was dangerous.
"I must turn over a new leaf, for her sake"
(he meant for his mother's), "and I can't turn
it while they are at my elbows." From which
conviction on the part of George Dallas it is
sufficiently evident that Routh and Harriet
had ample reason to apprehend that Dallas,
on whom they desired to retain a hold, for more
reasons than one, was slipping through their
fingers.

George Dallas was more than usually
occupied with such thoughts one morning, six
weeks after his unsuccessful visit to Poynings.
He had been very much with Routh and Deane
during this period, and yet he had begun to feel
aware, with a jealous and suspicious sense of it,
too, that he really knew very little of what they
had been about. They met in the evening, in
pursuit of pleasure, and they abandoned
themselves to it; or they met at Routh's lodgings,
and Dallas surrendered himself to the charm
which Harriet's society always had for him.
But he had begun to observe of late that there
was no reference to the occupation of the earlier
part of the day, and that while there was
apparently a close bond of mutual confidence or
convenience between Routh and Deane, there was
some under-current of mutual dislike.

"If my mother can only get me out of this
scrape, and I can get the Piccadilly people to
take my serial," said George Dallas to himself
one morning, when April was half gone, and
"the season" was half come, "I shall get away
somewhere, and go in for work in earnest."
He looked, ruefully enough, round the wretched
little bedroom, at whose small window he was
standing, as he spoke; and he thought