ces him!... You 're beggared--d 'ye know that? He's had
the two years of you, and sucked you dry. What were you about? What were
you doing? Did you have your head on? You shared cheque-books? good!...
The devil in hell never found such a fool as you! You had your house
full of your foreign bonyrobers--eh? Out with it! How did you pass your
time? Drunk and dancing?'

By such degrees my grandfather worked himself up to the pitch for his
style of eloquence. I have given a faint specimen of it. When I took the
liberty to consider that I had heard enough, he followed me out of the
library into the hall, where Janet stood. In her presence, he charged
the princess and her family with being a pack of greedy adventurers,
conspirators with 'that fellow' to plunder me; and for a proof of it, he
quoted my words, that my father's time had been spent in superintending
the opening of a coal-mine on Prince Ernest's estate. 'That fellow
pretending to manage a coal-mine!' Could not a girl see it was a shuffle
to hoodwink a greenhorn? And now he remembered it was Colonel Goodwin
and his daughter who had told him of having seen 'the fellow' engaged
in playing Court-buffoon to a petty German prince, and performing his
antics, cutting capers like a clown at a fair.

'Shame!' said Janet.

'Hear her!' The squire turned to me.

But she cried: 'Oh! grandada, hear yourself! or don't, be silent. If
Harry has offended you, speak like one gentleman to another. Don't rob
me of my love for you: I haven't much besides that.'

'No, because of a scoundrel and his young idiot!'

Janet frowned in earnest, and said: 'I don't permit you to change the
meaning of the words I speak.'

He muttered a proverb of the stables. Reduced to behave temperately, he
began the whole history of my bankers' book anew--the same queries, the
same explosions and imprecations.

'Come for a walk with me, dear Harry,' said Janet.

I declined to be protected in such a manner, absurdly on my dignity;
and the refusal, together possibly with some air of contemptuous
independence in the tone of it, brought the squire to a climax. 'You
won't go out and walk with her? You shall go down on your knees to her
and beg her to give you her arm for a walk. By God! you shall, now,
here, on the spot, or off you go to your German princess, with your
butler's legacy, and nothing more from me but good-bye and the door
bolted. Now, down with you!'

He expected me to descend.

'And if he