Thus arose the alliance, which grew stronger every day,
until Valentine took up his abode under the roof of his employer and
patron, and made himself more thoroughly at home there than the
unwelcome daughter of the house.
The history of Valentine Hawkehurst's past existence was tolerably well
known to the Captain; but the only history of the young man's early
life ever heard by Diana was rather vague and fragmentary. She
discovered, little by little, that he was the son of a spendthrift
_litterateur_, who had passed the greater part of his career within the
rules of the King's Bench; that he had run away from home at the age of
fifteen, and had tried his fortune in all those professions which
require no educational ordeal, and which seem to offer themselves
invitingly to the scapegrace and adventurer. At fifteen Valentine
Hawkehurst had been errand-boy in a newspaper office; at seventeen a
penny-a-liner, whose flimsy was pretty sure of admission in the
lower class of Sunday papers. In the course of a very brief career
he had been a provincial actor, a _manege_ rider in a circus, a
billiard-marker, and a betting agent. It was after having exhausted
these liberal professions that he encountered Captain Paget.
Such was the man whom Horatio Paget admitted to companionship with his
only daughter.
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