your friendship, left so thankfully to your discretion. Now that I have once more buried myself in Fawley, it is very unlikely that the man it pains me to name will seek me here. If he does, he cannot molest me as if I were in the London world. Continue, then, I pray you, to leave him alone. And in adopting your own shrewd belief that, after all, there is no such child as he pretends to claim, my mind becomes tranquillized on all that part of my private griefs.
Farewell, old school-friend! Here, so far as I can foretell—here, where my life began, it returns, when Heaven pleases, to close. Here I could not ask you to visit me: what is rest to me would be loss of time to you. But in my late and vain attempt to re-enter that existence in which you have calmly and wisely gathered round yourself "all that should accompany old age honor, love, obedience, troops of friends"—nothing so repaid the effort—nothing now so pleasantly remains to recollection—as the brief renewal of that easy commune which men like me never know, save with those whose laughter brings back to them a gale from the old play-ground. "Vive, vale;" I will not add, "Sis memor mei." So many my obligations to your kindness, that you will be forced to remember me whenever you recall the not "painful subjects" of early friendship and lasting gratitude. Recall only those when reminded of
CHAPTER XVIII.
No coinage in circulation so fluctuates in value as the worth of a Marriageable Man.
Colonel Morley was not surprised (that, we know, he could not be, by any fresh experience of human waywardness and caprice), but much disturbed and much vexed by the unexpected nature of Darrell's communication. Schemes for Darrell's future had become plans of his own. Talk with his old school-fellow had, within the last three months, entered into the pleasures of his age. Darrell's abrupt and final renunciation of this social world made at once a void in the business of Alban's mind, and in the affections of Alban's heart. And no adequate reason assigned for so sudden a flight and so morbid a resolve! Some tormenting remembrance—some rankling grief—distinct from those of which Alban was cognizant, those in which he had
