It was in October, when less than twenty pounds remained to them, that something at last turned up. Turquand had learnt that an assistant-editor was required on _The World and his Wife_, a weekly journal recently started for the benefit of the English and Americans in Paris. The Editor was familiarly known as "Billy" Beaufort, and the proprietor was a sporting baronet who had reduced his income from fourteen thousand per annum to eight by financing, and providing with the diamonds, which were the brightest feature of her performance, a lady who fancied that she was an actress. Beaufort had been the one dramatic critic who did not imply that she was painful, and it was Beaufort who had latterly assured the Baronet that _The World and his Wife_ would realise a fortune. He had gone about London for thirteen years assuring people that various enterprises would realise a fortune--that was his business--but the Baronet was one of the few persons who had believed him. Then Billy Beaufort took his watch, and his scarf-pin, and his sleeve-links away from Attenborough's--when in funds he could always pawn himself for a considerable amount--and turned up again resplendent at the club, whose secretary had been writing him sharp letters on the subject of his subscription. The only alloy to his complacence, though it did not dimmish it to any appreciable degree, was that he was scarcely more qualified to edit a paper than was a landsman to navigate a ship. He described himself as a journalist, and the description was probably as accurate as any other he could have furnished of a definite order; but he was a journalist whose attainments were limited to puffing a prospectus and serving up a réchauffé from _Truth_. Never attached to a paper for longer than two or three months, he was, during that period, usually attached to a woman too. He drove in hansoms every day of the year; always appeared to have bought his hat half an hour ago; affected a big picotee as a buttonhole, and lived--nobody knew how. While he was ridiculed in Fleet Street as a Pressman, he was treated with deference there on account of his reputed smartness in the City, and--while the City laughed at his business pretensions--there he was respected for his supposed abilities in Fleet Street. So he beamed out of the hansoms perkily, and drove from one atmosphere of esteem to another, waving a gloved hand, on the way, to clever men who envied him.