er the other.
There is but one thing would redeem me."

"What's that?"

"Never mind. We won't talk of it." Then he was silent, but Harry
Annesley knew very well that he had alluded to Florence Mountjoy.

Then Harry went, and Mountjoy was left to the companionship of Mr.
Merton, and such pleasure as he could find in a daily visit to his
father. He was, at any rate, courteous in his manner to the old man, and
abstained from those irritating speeches which Augustus had always
chosen to make. He had on one occasion during this visit told his father
what he thought about him, but this the squire had taken quite as a
compliment.

"I believe, you know, that you've done a monstrous injustice to
everybody concerned."

"I rather like doing what you call injustices."

"You have set the law at defiance."

"Well, yes; I think I have done that."

"According to my belief, it's all untrue."

"You mean about your mother. I like you for that; I do, indeed. I like
you for sticking up for your poor mother. Well, now you shall have fifty
pounds a month,--say twelve pounds ten a week,--as long as you remain at
Tretton, and you may have whom you like here, as long as they bring no
cards with them. And if you want to hunt there are horses, and if they
ain't good enough you can get others. But if you go away from Tretton
there's an end of it. It will all be stopped the next day."
Nevertheless, he did make arrangements by which Mountjoy should proceed
to Buston, stopping two nights as he went to London. "There isn't a club
he can enter," said the squire, comforting himself, "nor a Jew that will
lend him a five-pound note."

Mountjoy had told the truth when he had said that nothing was a comfort.
Though it seemed to his father and to the people around him at Tretton
that he had everything that a man could want, he had, in fact,
nothing,--nothing to satisfy him. In the first place, he was quite alive
to the misery of that decision given by the world against him, which had
been of such comfort to his father. Not a club in London would admit
him. He had been proclaimed a defaulter after such a fashion that all
his clubs had sent to him for some explanation; and as he had given
none, and had not answered their letters, his name had been crossed out
in the books of them all. He knew himself to be a man disgraced, and
when he had fled from London he had gone under the conviction that he
would certainly never return. There were the pistol a