This was the shape which Mr. Desmond’s reflections were wont to assume after a painful interview with Emily Jerningham. She loved him, and she would fain have believed in his love, but her familiar demon would not allow her so much peace, such pure delight. If Laurence succeeded in convincing her of his truth and devotion to-night, and left her at the gate of her pretty garden, smiling and happy, after a cordial pressure of her soft white hand, it was as likely as not that an hour’s solitary promenade and contemplation in the same pretty garden would enable the lady to develop new doubts and misgivings from her inner consciousness, which would result in a melancholy letter of five or six pages, written that night, and delivered next morning at Mr. Desmond’s late breakfast. Those who knew the editor of the _Areopagus_, and knew or guessed his position _auprès de_ Mrs. Jerningham, envied and hated him as the most fortunate of literary highflyers. What more could he desire? Had he not the regard of one of the handsomest and best-bred women in London, who would in all probability come in for a princely fortune whenever Jerningham should go off the hooks? Mr. Desmond was the last of men to admit the pinching of the shoe which he wore with so good a grace. No one among his intimates ventured the impertinence of a congratulation; but it was a generally understood thing that he was supremely happy, and that Mrs. Jerningham’s friendship was a blessing which he would not have bartered for a kingdom. And while his friends were permitted to suppose this, Laurence Desmond was profoundly miserable. “How will it end?” he asked himself sometimes; “and will it ever end?” CHAPTER XIII. MISS ST. ALBANS. AS an individual who, by arduous and unremitting labour--by the sweat of his brow and the ceaseless working of his brain--had contrived to secure for himself a decent income in the present and a moderate provision for the future, Mr. Desmond was of course a fitting mark for the arrows of that free-lance of modern civilization--the begging-letter writer. Men and women whose faces he had never seen wrote him pitiful letters, or impudent letters, as the case might be, urging requests which, if all or even half of them had been granted, would speedily have left him penniless. That he should have those of his own kith or kin--that he should have personal friends, or benefactors of the past with powerful claims upon him in the present--that he should have obligations to discharge, or debts to pay, or artistic tastes to gratify, never entered the heads of these poor needy people. His name and address were in the Directory, and he was supposed to be tolerably well off; so there was no more to do but to procure a sheet of paper and a penny stamp, and entreat of him the loan or donation of any given number of pounds, from five to a hundred.