house several times since the fatal day on which he had met there Colonel Morley, but Mrs. Haughton was never at home. And as, when the answer was given to him by the footman, he had more than once, on crossing the street, seen herself through the window, it was clear that his acquaintance was not courted. Jasper Losely, by habit, was the reverse of a pertinacious and troublesome suitor—not, Heaven knows, from want of audacity, but from excess of self-love. Where a Lovelace so superb condescended to make overtures, a Clarissa so tasteless as to decline them deserved and experienced his contempt. Besides, steadfast and prolonged pursuit of any object, however important and attractive, was alien to the levity and fickleness of his temper. But in this instance he had other motives than those on the surface for unusual perseverance.
A man like Jasper Losely never reposes implicit confidence in any one. He is garrulous, indiscreet—lets out much that Machiavel would have advised him not to disclose; but he invariably has nooks and corners in his mind which he keeps to himself. Jasper did not confide to his adopted mother his designs upon his intended bride. But she knew them through Poole, to whom he was more frank; and when she saw him looking over her select and severe library—taking therefrom the Polite Letter-Writer and the Elegant Extracts, Mrs. Crane divined at once that Jasper Losely was meditating the effect of epistolary seduction upon the Widow of Gloucester Place.
Jasper did not write a bad love-letter in the florid style. He had at his command, in especial, certain poetical quotations, the effect of which repeated experience had assured him to be as potent upon the female breast as the incantations or Carmina of the ancient sorcery. The following in particular:
"Had I a heart for falsehood framed,
I ne'er could injure you."
Another—generally to be applied when confessing that his career had been interestingly wild, and would, if pity were denied him, be pathetically short:
"When he who adores thee has left but the name
Of his faults and his follies behind."
Armed with these quotations—many a sentence from the Polite Letter-Writer or the Elegant Extracts—and a quire of roseedged paper, Losely sat down to Ovidian composition. But as he approached the close of Epistle the First, it occurred to him
