And, as he thought of his intended plans against Charley, he grinned like a hyena.
“To-morrow shall decide it,” he said, and smiled at the thought of the pit he would dig into which young Warbeck should fall.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE WOLF AND THE LAMB—A SCOUNDREL OF THE FIRST WATER.
Unluckily for himself, it was an evil day when Charley Warbeck first made the acquaintance of Phillip Redgill.
Phillip, as all knew, was a great don about town, and maintained a handsome suite of rooms, to which the gayest of the gay resorted.
His father was a very wealthy man, so all the world said; a great ship owner, and “a merchant prince of the good city of London.”
To be patronized by the son of such a person poor Charley considered “a very fine thing.”
“Wasn’t Phillip Redgill one of the sparks of fashion? Did not fair dames (of doubtful virtue, perhaps) smile bewitchingly upon him? Was he not nodded to by this lord and that one? Could he not handle a sword with almost any man?” said Charley, and many others. “And was it not a ‘great thing,’ therefore, to be known to, and to be hand and glove with such a person when I am only a chief clerk in the India House, and nought to depend upon but my own advancement and old Sir Richard’s generosity?”