of duty should lead you to exert yourself; your friends starve before your eyes, while you are shilly-shallying about your mistress. Have you no bowels for friendship?"
"A truce with this nonsense!" said Clifford, angrily.
"It is sense,—sober sense,—and sadness too;" rejoined Tomlinson. "Ned is discontented, our debts are imperious. Suppose now,—just suppose,—that we take a moonlight flitting from Bath, will that tell well for you whom we leave behind? yet this we must do, if you do not devise some method of refilling our purses. Either, then, consent to join us in a scheme meet for our wants, or pay our debts in this city, or fly with us to London, and dismiss all thoughts of that love which is so seldom friendly to the projects of ambition."
Notwithstanding the manner in which Tomlinson made this threefold proposition, Clifford could not but acknowledge the sense and justice contained in it; and a glance at the matter suf-
