“The country-bred cub was still fresh to the intoxication of his fancied happiness, when a man who had been familiar with him in his poverty came from the distant part of the world where they had met and known each other, and offered to be his friend. The cub’s ignorance of life was so complete, that he did not know it was possible for a man who bore her Majesty’s commission, and called himself a gentleman, to be a liar and a villain. He trusted his old acquaintance implicitly, and accepted him as a friend--believing, still in his boorish ignorance, that there was such a thing as friendship, or, at the worst, an honourable good fellowship between honest men. His friend did not tell him that he had been the engaged lover of the woman the boor was going to marry; and when the young couple began their new life, he planted himself in their house; and his first act was to shut the husband from the home whose dingiest room was a paradise, so long as it was sanctified by the presence of an idolized wife. Will any one at this table guess the plot which the boor’s friend hatched against him in the hour when their hands first met in friendship? I think not. The gentleman--polished, well-born, highly educated--allowed the country cub to marry the woman he loved; reserving to himself the hope of marrying her, enriched by the cub’s money, when the cub was dead. This once arranged, there was only one thing more to be settled; and that was the cub’s life. Unluckily he was a brawny six-foot fellow, with the constitution of a prize-fighter. But then prize-fighters are not always long-lived; their habits are so apt to be against them. Well, gentlemen, there have been men who have undermined a victim’s strength with small doses of antimony, while they smiled in his face, and called him brother. We manage these things better nowadays. The gentleman resolved that the boor should drink himself to death.” “Is this the plot of a French novel?” asked Roderick, superciliously, after a brief silence, in which Francis Tredethlyn had paused to take breath; “if it is, you had better tell us the title of the book, and let us read it in the original. There may be some chance of our thinking it interesting _then_.”