However, that is neither here nor there.

Your policy will be to follow up your advantages; and if you can persuade the young lady to change her name for Hawkehurst on the quiet some fine morning, without stopping to ask permission of her stepfather, or any one else, so much the better for you, and so much the more agreeable to me.

I'd rather do business with you than with my brother Phil; and I shan't be sorry to cry quits with that gentleman for the shabby trick he played me a few years ago." My Sheldon's brow darkened as he said this, and the moody fit returned.
That old grudge which my patron entertains against his brother must have relation to some very disagreeable business, if I may judge by George Sheldon's manner.
Here was a position for me, Valentine Hawkehurst, soldier of fortune, cosmopolitan adventurer, and child of the nomadic tribes who call Bohemia their mother country! Already blest with the sanction of my dear love's simple Yorkshire kindred, I was now assured of George Sheldon's favour; nay, urged onward in my paradisiac path by that unsentimental Mentor.

The situation was almost too much for my bewildered brain.

Charlotte an heiress, and George Sheldon eager to bring about my participation in the Haygarthian thousands! And now I sit in my little room 1a Omega-street, pondering upon the past, and trying to face the perplexities of the future.
Is this to be?
Am I, so hopeless an outsider in the race of life, to come in with a rush and win the prize which Fortune's first favourite might envy?
Can I hope or believe it?
Can the Fates have been playing a pleasant practical joke with me all this time, like those fairies who decree that the young prince shall pass his childhood and youth in the guise of a wild boar, only to be transformed into an Adonis at last by the hand of the woman who is disinterested enough to love him despite his formidable tusks and ungainly figure?
No! a thousand times no! The woman I love, and the fortune I have so often desired, are not for me.