"Because you will expect me to give you my name. I can't do it. I have
ceased to bear my family name; and, being out of society, what need have
I for an assumed name? As for my Christian name, it's so detestably ugly
that I hate the sight and sound of it. Here, they know me as The Lodger.
Will you have that? or will you have an appropriate nick-name? I come of
a mixed breed; and I'm likely, after what has happened to me, to turn out
a worthless fellow. Call me The Cur. Oh, you needn't start! that's as
accurate a description of me as any other. What's _your_ name?"

I wrote it for him. His face darkened when he found out who I was.

"Young, personally attractive, and a great landowner," he said. "I saw you
just now talking familiarly with Cristel Toller. I didn't like that at
the time; I like it less than ever now."

My pencil asked him, without ceremony, what he meant.

He was ready with his reply. "I mean this: you owe something to the good
luck which has placed you where you are. Keep your familiarity for ladies
in your own rank of life."

This (to a young man like me) was unendurable insolence. I had hitherto
refrained from taking him at his own bitter word in the matter of
nick-name. In the irritation of the moment, I now first resolved to adopt
his suggestion seriously. The next slip of paper that I handed to him
administered the smartest rebuff that my dull brains could discover on
the spur of the moment: "The Cur is requested to keep his advice till he
is asked for it."

For the first time, something like a smile showed itself faintly on his
lips--and represented the only effect which my severity had produced. He
still followed his own train of thought, as resolutely and as
impertinently as ever.

"I haven't seen you talking to Cristel before to-night. Have you been
meeting her in secret?"

In justice to the girl, I felt that I ought to set him right, so far.
Taking up the pencil again, I told this strange man that I had just
returned to England, after an absence of many years in foreign
countries--that I had known Cristel when we were both children--and that
I had met her purely by accident, when he had detected us talking outside
the cottage. Seeing me pause, after advancing to that point in the
writing of my reply, he held out his hand impatiently for the paper. I
signed him to wait, and added a last sentence: "Understand this; I will
answer no more questions--I have done with the subject."

He read