Rightly Montreuil had read the human heart! So long as Gerald lived in the country, and tasted not the full enjoyments of his great wealth, it would have been highly perilous to have made this disclosure; for, though Gerald had no great love for me, and was bold enough to run any danger, yet he was neither a Desmarais nor a Montreuil. He was that most capricious thing, a man of honour; and at that day he would instantly have given up the estate to me, and Montreuil and the philosopher to the hangman. But, after two or three years of every luxury that wealth could purchase; after living in those circles, too, where wealth is the highest possible merit, and public opinion, therefore, only honours the rich, fortune became far more valuable and the conscience far less nice. Living at Devereux Court, Gerald had only L30,000 a year; living in London, he had all that L30,000 a year can purchase: a very great difference this indeed! Honour is a fine bulwark against a small force; but, unbacked by other principle, it is seldom well manned enough to resist a large one. When, therefore, Montreuil showed Gerald that he could lose his estate in an instant; that the world would never give him credit for innocence, when guilt would have conferred on him such advantages; that he would therefore part with all those /et eoetera/ which, now in the very prime of life, made his whole idea of human enjoyments; that he would no longer be the rich, the powerful, the honoured, the magnificent, the envied, the idolized lord of thousands, but would sink at once into a younger brother, dependent on the man he most hated for his very subsistence,--since his debts would greatly exceed his portion,--and an object through life of contemptuous pity or of covert suspicion; that all this change could happen at a word of Montreuil's, what wonder that he should be staggered,--should hesitate and yield? Montreuil obtained, then, whatever sums he required; and through Gerald's influence, pecuniary and political, procured from the minister a tacit permission for him to remain in England, under an assumed name and in close retirement. Since then, Montreuil (though secretly involved in treasonable practices) had appeared to busy himself solely in negotiating a pardon at Paris. Gerald had lived the life of a man who, if he has parted with peace of conscience, will make the best of the bargain by procuring every kind of pleasure in exchange; and /le petit/ Jean Desmarais, useful to both priest and spendthrift, had passed his time very agreeably,--laughing at his employers, studying philosophy, and filling his pockets; for I need scarcely add that Gerald forgave him without much difficulty for his share in the forgery. A man, as Oswald shrewdly observed, is seldom inexorable to those crimes by which he has profited. "And where lurks Montreuil now?" I asked; "in the neighbourhood of Devereux Court?"