to dance with him.  These meetings afforded full opportunity for the young man to push himself still farther into her good opinion, and to prevail upon her at length to meet him clandestinely, which she frequently did on Sunday afternoons, when, as has already been seen, she would ride out in his company.  This kind of intimacy soon led to a declaration of love on the part of Sanford, which was fully responded to by the foolish girl.  The former had much, he thought, to hope for in in a union with Miss Meadows.  Her father was well off, and in a very excellent business.  His fortune would be made if he could rise to the position of his son-in-law.  He did not hope to do this by a fair and open offer for Harriet’s hand.  The character of Meadows, which was decided, precluded all hope of gaining his consent after he had once frowned upon his approaches.  The only road to success was a secret marriage, and to that he was gradually inclining the mind of the daughter at the time our story opened.

It is not always that a villain remains such alone.  He generally, by a kind of intuition, perceives who are like him in interiors, and he associates with these on the principle that birds of a feather flock together.  He was particularly intimate with one of Larkin’s clerks, a young man named Hatfield, who had no higher views of life than himself, and who was governed by no sounder principles.  Hatfield found it necessary to be more guarded than Sanford, from the fact that his employer was gifted with much closer observation than was Millard.  He, too, rode a fast trotting horse on Sunday, but he knew pretty well the round taken by Larkin on that day, and the hours when he attended church, and was very careful never to meet him.  At some place of public resort, a few miles from the city, he would join Sanford, and together they would spend the afternoon.

On Jane Larkin, his employer’s only daughter, Hatfield had for some time looked with a favourable eye.  But he felt very certain that neither her father nor mother would favor his addresses.  Occasionally, with her parents’ knowledge, he would attend her to places of public amusement.  But both himself and the young lady saw that even this was not a thing that fully met their approbation.  Hatfield would, on such occasions, ingeniously allude to this fact, and thus gather from Jane how she regarded their coldness.  It was not agreeable to her, he quickly perceived.  This encouraged him to push matters further.

Soon the two understood each other fully, and soon after the tacit opposition of the parents to their intimacy was a matter of conversation between them, whenever they could get an opportunity of talking together without awakening suspicion.