Lights and Shadows of London Life. 205 



Voice whose tone seemed to express a doubt as to the reception the 

 offering might meet, " I have ventured to bring this glass of 

 cordial as a preventive to the consequences of exposure to such a 

 night may I trust that you will pardon the liberty, and extend it 

 also to a request that you will not again unnecessarily venture abroad 

 in such weather or at such hours?" No reply was waited for with 

 the last words she had left the room. There was little discernment 

 requisite to detect, in the agent of this kind consideration, the source 

 whence the daily attentions of which he was the object proceeded. 

 Although Chalcroft had seen her before, their acquaintance had 

 never exceeded a passing bow, and its slight acknowledgment ; it 

 was the first time they had ever spoken. The master of the house 

 he had never met, and to the report of his servant alone he owed 

 the knowledge of the existence of such a person. He learnt merely 

 that once or twice a week, at a late hour, that individual used to 

 arrive, and depart again in the morning as soon as it was light. It 

 was understood that he was in business in an adjoining town ; still 

 there appeared something obscure about him. He usually spent his 

 Sundays with the family, but rarely, if ever, upon those days was 

 he known to leave the house. The servant who furnished this account 

 would have enlarged upon it, had he received encouragement he 

 did allude to an evident want of cordiality that awaited him on his 

 arrivals to an unsatisfied manner upon his part upon hers a dis- 

 position to avoid and retire from his reception, when the progress of 

 his communication was abruptly put a stop to. 



The succeeding morning brought a hope "that the severe night 

 to which he had been exposed had not produced any bad conse- 

 quences to Mr. Leslie," the name which Chalcroft had assumed when 

 he quitted England on the total wreck of his fortune. The acquaint- 

 ance thus begun advanced with a rapid course ; from cordiality the 

 step was short to esteem to intimacy to a reciprocity of regard 

 whose progress bade defiance to limit to an attachment whose 

 career was brief as its catastrophe was disastrous. 



CHAPTER VI. 



A very concise allusion to one, whose story will develope itself in 

 the action of the narrative, will be sufficient in this place. Little 

 more than a month had elapsed since the commencement of a con- 

 nexion into which the very soul of Chalcroft had thrown itself. The 

 energies which had slept for years had been awakened to a new and 

 intense existence. His life assumed a force and spirit of which till 

 now it had seemed incapable. Fate, chance, or destiny, had effected 

 that moral revolution which one, whom I am proud to write my 

 friend, has typified in her powerful allegory of " Frankenstein." 

 Being had been given to a spirit which once called from " the vasty 

 deep" of human passion, like the monster-labour of the German 

 philosopher, laughed to scorn the power of the charmer by whom it 

 had been summoned ! We have seen how little suited he was, whose 

 fortunes this sketch would portray, to resist the allurements whose 

 appeals were only to the senses ; how much the less fitted then would 



