the situation of his cousin ; and pointing to a card-table, they sat down. Flatter took up the cards, but his recollections were not yet allayed, and he flung them down again with something little short of an execration. "A mad world, my masters," soliloquized Vaughan, looking on him as he deliberately tore card after card. "Yes, Sir," said Flatter, "a mad world; and let me tell you a bad world too. Deception, trickery, and false play in every soul that tenants every body above the peasant; and he is honest only because he is a beast of burden, and falls asleep under his load. You are a young man, Sir, and have yet to learn what a peep behind the curtain of the haut-ton alone can teach. See that young fellow, all moustaches and monkery, with a face as free from care as it is free from any trait of understanding, honour, or manliness;-see him heaping his heavy attentions on that ancient dame, who receives them with such boundless gratitude. That fellow is absolutely ruined, not worth a beggarly denier; living in the rules of the King's Bench, the only rules he will ever live in." A bitter smile at the point quivered over his cheek. "And the lady ?" said Vaughan. "The lady, Sir, has been only twenty years the wife of a man who has lavished on her all that almost immeasurable wealth could procure. She is the mother of

a large family; and yet within these three days she will elope with that broken profligate."

Vaughan shrank from the picture, and turned to another group that were lounging over a portfolio. "Ay, there," said Flatter, 66 you see tastes of another kind. There an old slave of excess is teaching the young idea how to shoot, and beguiling that pretty, delicate, and opulent young simpleton into giving her beeves and acres to his generosity. In one month from this minute, she will be living on the bounty of her relations, and he be flourishing away on the Continent, in scorn of debt and dun, with his chère amie, the wife of that respectable-looking peer with whom he is, ay, on my soul, at this moment, shaking hands as if they were a pair of brothers."

"Yet," observed Vaughan, "not at all doubting your knowledge, can Mrs. Courtney be acquainted with all this?" "With every tittle," said Flatter." Then how can she admit them to her parties?" "Pho," replied the Cicerone, "how can she exclude them? Would you have her shut up her house, like a theatre, for mere want of an audience? Would you have her go to war with the whole polite world? You may select your pointers, or your merino sheep, or your prize pigs, but who the deuce that gives a

rout can select her company? You must take the crows as black as Nature made them. The first necessity is to fill your ranks; and if you can't get your troops of the regulation size, why, what can you do but recruit from the army of reserve? No, not of reserve," said he with a smile; "of that quality they are guiltless, to do them justice." Vaughan was amused, but still more repelled by the unrelaxing acrimony of Flatter, who had now fairly abandoned all his pretensions to sycophancy. "There, at least," said he, pointing to a showy personage of mature age, with a star, sitting by a mature woman who had evidently been extremely handsome, and with whom he conversed with a grave yet intimate interest" there is something to console the eye for those ill-assorted connexions. That nobleman and his lady have the true look of matrimonial confidence and decorum. They have gone apart evidently to avoid the frivolities round them." "Yes," said Flatter, 'you are a physiognomist, and can perceive matrimony in both their faces. They are married.""Their name"-said Vaughan. "Not exactly the same now," replied Flatter, "though it was so once. They, however, have sympathized in all their doings since. They both ran away from each other;-they oth sued for a divorce;-they both married persons whom they both habitually turned to

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ridicule,and of whom they both are now weary beyond all telling; and both profess, at this moment, something as ardent and absurd as a passion for each other; the gentleman declaring the lady to be the most charming woman in England, and the lady declaring the gentleman to be the most irresistible person on earth. They visit each other with a graceful punctuality, worthy of, the days when knights wore armour, and women were divinities. At the opera, the lady's box is regularly adorned by the gentleman's assi duities; and at parties, as you see, they pass the evening cooing on the same perch, a pair of turtles; quite a rebuke to the lightness of the boys and girls round us, and fully deserving of their name, the divine divorcees,' or the separable inseparables.""

CHAPTER V.

A habitation giddy and unsure

Hath he that buildeth on the vulgar heart.

Shakspeare.

When people of superior fortune, whom Providence has enabled to bestow obligations, claim a right, from the favour they confer, to tyrannize over the hopes and fears of a mind in distress, they exercise a cruelty more barbarous than any in the whole history of human nature.

Know your own mind.»

CATHERINE GREVILLE was the daughter of the late Mr. Courtney's eldest sister, who had married an officer in the Indian army, reputed to be a man of some consideration and fortune. Colonel Greville, on the loss of his wife, had returned to England, principally on account of his daughter, the only child she had left behind her, then but seven years of age; on whose delicate constitution the effects of the climate were already visible. It was his intention, at this time, to have retired from the service, and lived for his child alone; but Catherine, however engaging and amusing, was too young for a companion, and could not make up to him for the society and occupations he had lost. His income was large, but from his habits,