se."

"What did he say to you? Was he impudent?"

"He did not insult me, if you mean that; but he was impudent in not
going away, and I could not get rid of him for an hour. He says that you
have doubly ruined him."

"As how?"

"You would not let Amelia have the fortune that you promised her; and I
think his object now was to get the fortune without the girl. And he
said, also, that he had lent five hundred pounds to your Captain
Scarborough."

"He is not my Captain Scarborough."

"And that when you were settling the captain's debts his was the only
one you would not pay in full."

"He is a rogue,--an arrant rogue!"

"But he says that he's got the captain's name to the five hundred
pounds; and he means to get it some of these days, now that the captain
and his father are friends again. The long and the short of it is, that
he wants five hundred pounds by hook or by crook, and that he thinks you
ought to let him have it."

"He'll get it, or the greater part of it. There's no doubt he'll get it
if he has got the captain's name. If I remember right, the captain did
sign a note for him to that amount,--and he'll get the money if he has
stuck to it."

"Do you mean that Captain Scarborough would pay all his debts?"

"He will have to pay that one, because it was not included in the
schedule. What do you think has turned up now?"

"Some other scheme?"

"It is all scheming,--base, false scheming,--to have been concerned with
which will be a disgrace to my name forever!"

"Oh, papa!"

"Yes; forever! He has told me, now, that Mountjoy is his true,
legitimate, eldest son. He declares that that story which I have
believed for the last eight months has been altogether false, and made
out of his own brain to suit his own purposes. In order to enable him to
defraud these money-lenders he used a plot which he had concocted long
since, and boldly declared Augustus to be his heir. He made me believe
it; and because I believed it, even those greedy, grasping men, who
would not have given up a tithe of their prey to save the whole family,
even they believed it too. Now, at the very point of death, he comes
forward with perfect coolness, and tells me that the whole story was a
plot made out of his own head."

"Do you believe him now?"

"I became very wroth, and said that it was a lie! I did think that it
was a lie. I did flatter myself that in a matter concerning my own
business, and in which I was bound to look after