is seat, and helped himself to snuff out of the enamelled
gold box, on which Merton deemed it politic to keep a watchful eye.

'Man, I'm sweir' (reluctant) 'to come to the point,' said Lord Restalrig.

Merton erroneously understood him to mean that he was under oath or vow
to come to the point, and showed a face of attention.

'I'm not the man I was. The doctors don't understand my case--they take
awful fees--but I see they think ill of it. And that sets a body
thinking. Have you a taste of brandy in the house?'

As the visitor's weather-beaten ruddiness had changed to a ghastly ashen
hue, rather bordering on the azure, Merton set forth the liqueur case,
and drew a bottle of soda water.

'No water,' said the peer; 'it's just ma twal' ours, an auld Scotch
fashion,' and he took without winking an orthodox dram of brandy. Then
he looked at the silver tops of the flasks.

'A good coat!' he said. 'Yours?'

Merton nodded.

'Ye quarter the Douglas Heart. A good coat. Dod, I'll speak plain. The
name, Mr. Merton, when ye come to the end o' the furrow, the name is all
ye have left. We brought nothing into the world but the name, we take
out nothing else. A sore dispensation. I'm not the man I was, not this
two years. I must dispone, I know it well. Now the name, that I thought
that I cared not an empty whistle for, is worn to a rag, but I cannot
leave it in the mire. There's just one that bears it, one Logan by name,
and true Logan by the mother's blood. The mother's mother, my cousin,
was a bonny lass.'

He paused; his enfeebled memory was wandering, no doubt, in scenes more
vivid to him than those of yesterday.

Merton was now attentive indeed. The miserly marquis had become, to him,
something other than a curious survival of times past. There was a
chance for Logan, his friend, the last of the name, but Logan was firmly
affianced to Miss Markham, of the cloak department at Madame Claudine's.
And the marquis, as he said, 'had come about stopping a marriage,' and
Merton was to help him in stopping it, in disentangling Logan!

The old man aroused himself. 'I have never seen the lad but once, when
he was a bairn. But I've kept eyes on him. He _has_ nothing, and since
I came to London I hear that he has gone gyte, I mean--ye'll not
understand me--he is plighted to a long-legged shop-lass, the daughter of
a ne'er-do-well Australian land-louper, a doctor. This must not be. Now
I'll speak plain to you