"It isn't as if she really cared about Hester," he would say to himself, or to the friend with whom he was almost as confidential; "but she doesn't, you know; she only cares to make Hester give parties for her purposes--parties by which the old cat pays off all her own obligations; and to have the use of Hester's carriage, and the advantage of Hester's popularity--for every one likes my wife.--I understand her. I'm a sharp fellow in some things, dear old boy, though I never could take to pens and parchment, and look wise and bilious, like you." And Charley Yeldham thought what an enviable nature was this young man's, and what a pity it would be to disturb his serenity by any revelations, supposing it ever came within his power to make them. Perhaps it may appear that Yeldham's cogitations were needless, and that Frere's was not the kind of serenity to be disturbed by any discovery which only touched the past; but this was not so. The one or two points on which Hester did not know her husband's character were precisely those on which his old chum and faithful friend understood him best. No unmanly laziness, no idle abandonment to the mere surface follies of existence, dictated Gordon Frere's ignorance of the details of the management of his wife's fortune. He knew she was, as he said, "a deuced clever woman, and a first-rate hand at business," and he simply acted, having no meanness in him, on his belief. He never thought at all about the nature of the investments in which his wife's money was placed, neither did he ever think about her former relations with the Streightleys; and had he known that Robert was Hester's debtor to the large amount, which she had advanced to him through Thacker, he would not have seen in the transaction any thing beyond the merest ordinary matter of business. Gordon Frere was excessively shocked by the intelligence of Mr. Guyon's death. Not that he had any regard for him; indeed, rather because he had not, and because he knew him better (though far from thoroughly) than most of Mr. Guyon's friends, who had not had "business" transactions with the departed gentleman, knew him; and such a death, come to after such a fashion, had a grim and painful effect on a mind which was not callous or irreverent, only frivolous and untrained.