daughter: "Does Leonore say she hasn't a penny?"

"She says she will have to give up everything to the creditors. I
suppose," said Susan, hesitating, "everything may not mean--I thought
marriage settlements could not be touched by creditors?"

"No more they can, that's the deuce of it."

"Then----?" She looked inquiringly, and strange to say, the fierce
countenance before her coloured beneath the look.

If he could have evaded it, General Boldero would have let the question
remain unanswered, although it was only Sue, Sue who knew her parent as
no one else knew him--before whom he made no pretences, assumed no
disguises--who had now to learn an ugly truth;--as it was, he shot it at
her with as good an air as he could assume.

"She has no settlement, damn it."

"No settlement?" In her amazement the open letter fell from the
listener's hands. She recollected, she could never forget, the glee
with which her father had rubbed his hands over the "clinking
settlement" he had anticipated from Leonore's wealthy suitor, nor the
manner in which it had insinuated itself into every announcement of the
match. No settlement? She simply stared in silence.

"If you will have it, it was my doing," owned General Boldero
reluctantly; "and I could bite my tongue off now to think of it! But
what with four of you on my hands, and the rents going down and
everything else going up, I had nothing to settle--that is, I had
nothing I could _conveniently_ settle, and it might have been awkward,
uncommonly awkward. I could hardly have got out of it if Godfrey had
expected a _quid pro quo_. And he might--he very well might. A man of
his class can't be expected to understand how a man of ours has to live
decently and keep up appearances while yet he hasn't a brass farthing to
spare. I'll say that for Godfrey Stubbs, he seemed sensible on the point
when I tried to explain; and--and somehow I was taken in and thought:
'You may be a bounder, but you are a very worthy fellow'."

He paused, and continued. "Then he suggested--it was his own idea, I
give you my word for it--that we should have no greedy lawyers lining
their pockets out of either of our purses. What he said was--I've as
clear a recollection of it as though it were yesterday--'Oh, bother the
settlement, I'll make a will leaving everything I possess to
Leonore,'--and I, like a numskull, jumped at the notion. It never
occurred to me that the will of a business man may be so much waste