Such was Mr. Lobyer. He came to London, and took his place in a certain circle of London society, with nothing to recommend him but a reputation for enormous wealth. There were those who remembered him in Paris, and who knew the manner in which he had completed his education in that brilliant capital. But if there went abroad the rumour that the millionaire's youth had been wild and foolish, feminine compassion and masculine generosity conspired to forget and ignore his early follies. From a crowd of beautiful and intellectual women the Manchester man might have chosen the loveliest, and would have incurred small hazard of a refusal. There were women who scorned his money as utterly as they despised himself; but in the drawing-rooms of Tyburnia and Kensingtonia those women were few and far between. The value of wealth increases with the growing refinement of taste. The purest attributes of the human mind--the love of art, the worship of beauty, the keen sense of grace--combine to render intellectual man the slave of material prosperity. The gems of ancient art, the work of modern artists, the thoroughbred hack on which Beauty prances in the Row, the villa on Streatham Common or the cottage by Strawberry Hill, for whose shelter the soul of the retiring citizen yearns as the refuge of his declining age,--all command a higher price every year; and every year the steady march of intellect advances, and there are more connoisseurs to sigh for old pictures, more would-be patrons of modern art, more citizens whose cultivated sense of the beautiful inspires a yearning for villas on Streatham Common or cottages by Strawberry Hill, more ambitious middle-class belles who have seen from afar off the prancing of patrician Beauty's steeds, and who sigh for thoroughbred saddle-horses of their own. Mr. Lobyer himself was unattractive; but in Mr. Lobyer's wealth there lurked the elements of all those costly treasures and refinements that make life beautiful. He was known to be stupid; and mercenary Beauty, jumping at a conclusion, decided that he was just the sort of person to submit himself unresistingly to the management of a wife. Under the wand of that enchantress, the dull figures in his banking-book might be transformed into the art-treasures of a second Grosvenor House, the gardens of a new Chatsworth, the stables of a Lord Stamford, a fairy boudoir which even the Empress Eugénie might approve, and jewels which the Duchess of Newcastle might admire and the Duke of Brunswick envy.