“What a wonderful affair this is of Germaine’s—eh, Villiers?” said Captain Jernyngham, carressing his mustache. “Just like a thing in a play, or a story, where everybody turns out the most unexpected things. The Duke of B—— is going crazy about it. He had invited Germaine to his house, and the fellow was making the fiercest sort of love to his pretty daughter, when all of a sudden, it turns out that he is a robber, a gipsy, a burglar, and all sorts of horrors. How the deuce came it to pass that he entered Eton with us, and passed himself off as a gentleman?”
“I cannot tell; the whole affair is involved in mystery.”
“You and he were pretty intimate—were you not, my lord?”
“Yes, I took a fancy to Germaine from the first; and I don’t believe, yet, he is guilty of the crime they charge him with.”
“You don’t, eh? See what it is to have faith in human nature! How are you to get over the evidence.”
“It was only circumstantial.”
“Granted; but it was most conclusive. There is not another man in London has the slightest doubt of his guilt but yourself.”
“Poor Germaine!” said Lord Villiers, in a tone of deep feeling; “with all his brilliant talents, his high endowments, and refined nature, to come to such a sad end! To be obliged to mate with the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile—men degraded by every species of crime, below the level of the brute! And this for life! Poor Germaine!”
The young guardsman shrugged his shoulders.
“If refined men will steal—oh, I forgot! you don’t believe it,” he said, as Lord Villiers made an impatient motion, “Well, I confess, I thought better things of Germaine myself. There was always something of the dare-devil in him, and he was reckless and extravagant to a fault; but upon my honor, I never thought he could have come to this. Have you seen him since his trial?”