ey
will oust Elizabeth Murray and set their pet pupil in her place, and
manage the land and the money and everything else for him. And what will
Mrs. Luttrell say?"

He paused, and changed his position uneasily. His brows contracted; his
eye grew restless as he continued to reflect.

"It's my belief," he said at last, "that Mrs. Luttrell will be
enchanted. And then what will become of me?"

He rose from his chair and began to pace up and down the room. "What
will become of me?" he repeated. "What will become of the
fifteen-hundred a-year, and the house and grounds, and all the rest of
the good things that she promised to give me? They will go, no doubt, to
the son and heir. Did she ever propose to give me anything while Richard
and Brian had to be provided for? Not she! She notices me now only
because she thinks that I am the only Luttrell in existence. When she
knows that there is a son of her's still living, I shall go to the wall.
I shall be ruined. There will be no Netherglen for me, no marriage with
an heiress, no love-making with pretty little Kitty. I shall have to
disappear from the scene. I cannot hold my ground against a son--a son
of the house! Curses on him! Why isn't he dead?"

Hugo bestowed a few choice Sicilian epithets of a maledictory character
upon Dino Vasari and Brian Luttrell both; then he returned to the table
and studied the latter pages of Father Cristoforo's letter.

"Meet him in London. I should like to meet Dino Vasari, too. I wonder
whether Brian had read this letter when he dropped it. These
instructions come at the very end. If he has not read these sentences, I
might find a way of outwitting them all yet. I think I could prevent
Dino Vasari from ever setting foot in Scotland. How can I find out?"

"And what an extraordinary thing for Brian to do--to take a tutorship in
the very family where Elizabeth Murray is living. What has he done it
for? Is he in love with one of those girls? Or does he hope to retrieve
his mistake by persuading Elizabeth Murray to marry him? A very
round-about way of getting back his fortune, unless he means to induce
Dino Vasari to hold his tongue. If Dino Vasari were out of the way, and
Brian felt his title to the estate rather shaky, of course, it would be
very clever of him to make love to Elizabeth. But he's too great a fool
for that. What was his motive, I wonder? Is it possible that he did not
know who she was?"

But he rejected this suggestion as an e