Mr. Lobyer had a lodging in Jermyn Street--a _pied-à-terre_, he called it. And it is to be set down to his credit that his French would have inflicted no outrage on ears accustomed to the pure accents of the Français. The days are past in which commercial wealth and ignorance have gone hand in hand. The _parvenu_ of to-day is generally an elegant and highly-accomplished gentleman, who has seen every thing that is to be seen, and been taught every thing that an expensive course of education can teach. Mr. Lobyer had played cricket with young lordlings on the meads of Eaton--he had been plucked at Oxford--he had scampered over Europe, and improved his mind in the society of the crocodiles of the Nile--he had steeped himself to the lips in the worst dissipations of Paris, and had given as much pain and anxiety to a very worthy father as can well be concentrated in the declining years of a parent's life. There were scandal-mongers in the cotton country who said that Thomas Lobyer junior had broken the heart of Thomas Lobyer senior. He was an only son--an only child; and the wealthy manufacturer had beguiled the dull routine of his business life by a splendid dream during the years of his son's boyhood. If the boy had been a prince his education could scarcely have been more carefully supervised, or paid for with a more lavish hand. But conscientious tutors washed their hands of the profitable pupil when they found that he was stupid and arrogant, profligate and hypocritical, and that he was gifted with a bull-dog obstinacy which rendered all efforts at correction hopeless. The time came before the death of his father, when there was no alternative but to let him go his own way. "I might disinherit you, and leave my money to an hospital," wrote the old man in the last letter he ever addressed to his son; "and God knows you have given me enough provocation to do so. But if I could forget that you are the child of the wife I loved, I should still be deterred from such a step by the fear of its consequences. If you have done so badly with all the advantages of wealth, what would become of you exposed to the temptations of poverty? Your grandfather began life as a workhouse apprentice--there are plenty of people in Manchester who know all about him; but there wasn't a man in his native city who wasn't proud to shake him by the hand, or a woman who didn't point to him as an example to her sons."