intelligence! Think of it!
When my father was born----but that is another story. To return: we had
here the elements of such a combustion as I dread to think of--your
cousin and the journal. Let him but glance an eye upon that column of
print, and where were we? It is easy to ask; not so easy to answer, my
young friend. And let me tell you, this sheet is the Viscount's usual
reading. It is my conviction he had it in his pocket."

"I beg your pardon, sir," said I. "I have been unjust. I did not
appreciate my danger."

"I think you never do," said he.

"But yet surely that public scene----" I began.

"It was madness. I quite agree with you," Mr. Romaine interrupted. "But
it was your uncle's orders, Mr. Anne, and what could I do? Tell him you
were the murderer of Goguelat? I think not."

"No, sure!" said I. "That would but have been to make the trouble
thicker. We were certainly in a very ill posture."

"You do not yet appreciate how grave it was," he replied. "It was
necessary for you that your cousin should go, and go at once. You
yourself had to leave to-night under cover of darkness, and how could
you have done that with the Viscount in the next room? He must go, then;
he must leave without delay. And that was the difficulty."

"Pardon me, Mr. Romaine, but could not my uncle have bidden him to go?"
I asked.

"Why, I see I must tell you that this is not so simple as it sounds," he
replied. "You say this is your uncle's house, and so it is. But to all
effects and purposes it is your cousin's also. He has rooms here; has
had them coming on for thirty years now, and they are filled with a
prodigious accumulation of trash--stays, I dare say, and powder-puffs,
and such effeminate idiocy--to which none could dispute his title, even
suppose any one wanted to. We had a perfect right to bid him go, and he
had a perfect right to reply, 'Yes, I will go, but not without my stays
and cravats. I must first get together the nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine
chestsful of insufferable rubbish, that I have spent the last thirty
years collecting--and may very well spend the next thirty hours
a-packing of.' And what should we have said to that?"

"By way of repartee?" I asked. "Two tall footmen and a pair of crabtree
cudgels, I suggest."

"The Lord deliver me from the wisdom of laymen!" cried Romaine. "Put
myself in the wrong at the beginning of a lawsuit? No, indeed! There was
but one thing to do, and I did it, and burned my last c