"Ah, very true,--very true: but you don't see, sir,--you don't see, that it is well worth nine. Sad times,--sad times: jobs from the crown are growing scarcer every day, Mr. Saville." "Humph! that's all a chance, a speculation. Times are bad indeed, as you say: no money in the market; go, Glosson; offer him five; your percentage shall be one per cent. higher than if I pay six thousand, and shall be counted up to the latter sum." "He! he! he! sir!" grinned Glosson; "you are fond of your joke, Mr. Saville." "Well, now; what else in the market? never mind my friend: Mr. Godolphin--Mr. Glosson; now all gene is over; proceed,--proceed." Glosson hummed, and bowed, and hummed again, and then glided on to speak of houses, and crown lands, and properties in Wales, and places at court (for some of the subordinate posts at the palace were then--perhaps are now--regular matter of barter); and Saville, bending over the table, with his thin delicate hands clasped intently, and his brow denoting his interest, and his sharp shrewd eye fixed on the agent, furnished to the contemplative Godolphin a picture which he did not fail to note, to moralise on, to despise! What a spectacle is that of the prodigal rake, hardening and sharpening into the grasping speculator! CHAPTER XX. FANNY MILLINGER ONCE MORE.--LOVE.--WOMAN.--BOOKS.--A HUNDRED TOPICS TOUCHED ON THE SURFACE.--GODOLPHIN'S STATE OF MIND MORE MINUTELY EXAMINED.--THE DINNER AT SAVILLE'S. Godolphin went to see and converse with Fanny Millinger. She was still unmarried, and still the fashion. There was a sort of allegory of real life, in the manner in which, at certain epochs, our Idealist was brought into contact with the fair actress of ideal creations. There was, in short, something of a moral in the way these two streams of existence--the one belonging to the Actual, the other to the Imaginary--flowed on, crossing each other at stated times. Which was the more really imaginative--the life of the stage, or that of the world's stage? The gay Fanny was rejoiced to welcome back again her early lover. She ran on, talking of a thousand topics, without remarking the absent mind and musing eye of Godolphin, till he himself stopped her somewhat abruptly:-- "Well, Fanny, well, and what do you know of Saville? You have grown intimate with him, eh? We shall meet at his house this evening."