ons falsely. To that extent he had
been veracious. It appeared, that driven hard by the squire, who
would have no waving of flags and lighting of fireworks in a matter of
business, and whose 'commoner's mind' chafed sturdily at a hint of the
necessity for lavish outlays where there was a princess to win, he had
rallied on the fiction that many of the cheques, standing for the
bulk of the sums expended, were moneys borrowed by him of me, which he
designed to repay, and was prepared to repay instantly--could in fact,
the squire demanding it, repay, as it were, on the spot; for behold,
these borrowed moneys were not spent; they were moneys invested in
undertakings, put out to high rates of interest; moneys that perhaps it
would not be adviseable to call in without a season of delay; still, if
Mr. Beltham, acting for his grandson and heir, insisted, it should be
done. The moneys had been borrowed purely to invest them with profit on
my behalf: a gentleman's word of honour was pledged to it.

The squire grimly gave him a couple of months to make it good.

Dorothy Beltham and my father were together for about an hour at
Eckerthy's farm. She let my father kiss her hand when he was bending
to take his farewell of her, but held her face away. He was in manifest
distress, hardly master of his voice, begged me to come to him soon,
and bowing, with 'God bless you, madam, my friend on earth!' turned his
heel, bearing his elastic frame lamentably. A sad or a culprit air did
not befit him: one reckoned up his foibles and errors when seeing him
under a partly beaten aspect. At least, I did; not my dear aunt, who
was compassionate of him, however thoroughly she condemned his ruinous
extravagance, and the shifts and evasions it put him to. She feared,
that instead of mending the difficulty, he had postponed merely to
exaggerate it in the squire's mind; and she was now of opinion that
the bringing him down to meet the squire was very bad policy, likely
to result in danger to my happiness; for, if the money should not
be forthcoming on the date named, all my father's faults would be
transferred to me as his accomplice, both in the original wastefulness
and the subterfuges invented to conceal it. I recollected that a sum of
money had really been sunk in Prince Ernest's coal-mine. My aunt said
she hoped for the best.

Mounting the heaths, we looked back on the long yellow road, where the
carriage conveying my father to the railway-station