State. You can no more question a man's right to be a Smith than his
right to be a Briton; and wide as the diversity of rank, lineage, virtue,
and genius in Britons is the diversity in Smiths. But still a name so
generic often affects a definitive precursor. Jasper signed himself "J.
COURTENAY SMITH." He called, and left epistle the first with his own
kid-gloved hand, inquiring first if Mrs. Haughton were at home, and,
responded to in the negative this time, he asked for her son. "Her son
was gone abroad with Colonel Morley." Jasper, though sorry to lose
present hold over the boy, was consoled at learning that the Colonel was
off the ground. Afore sanguine of success, he glanced up at the window,
and, sure that Mrs. Haughton was there, though he saw her not, lifted his
hat with as melancholy an expression of reproach as he could throw into
his face.

The villain could not have found a moment in Mrs. Haughton's widowed life
so propitious to his chance of success. In her lodging-house at Pimlico,
the good lady had been too incessantly occupied for that idle train of
revery, in which the poets assure us that Cupid finds leisure to whet his
arrows and take his aim. Had Lionel still been by her side, had even
Colonel Morley been in town, her affection for the one, her awe of the
other, would have been her safeguards. But alone in that fine new house,
no friends, no acquaintances as yet, no dear visiting circle on which to
expend the desire of talk and the zest for innocent excitement that are
natural to ladies of an active mind and a nervous temperament, the sudden
obtrusion of a suitor so respectfully ardent,--oh, it is not to be denied
that the temptation was IMMENSE.

And when that note, so neatly folded, so elegantly sealed, lay in her
irresolute hand, the widow could not but feel that she was still young,
still pretty; and her heart flew back to the day when the linendraper's