her topic; but it was not so
easy to tear Sir Arthur from such a theme, and he went on.

"It would not do for you, perhaps, to make any advances towards him."

"I should like to see myself!" said Tony, half choking with angry
impatience.

"I repeat, it would not do for _you_ to take this step; but if you had
a friend--a man of rank and station--one whose position your uncle could
not but acknowledge as at least the equal of his own--"

"He could be no friend of mine who should open any negotiations on my
part with a relation who has treated my mother so uncourteously, sir."

"I think you are under a mistake, Tony. Mrs. Butler told me that it was
rather her own fault than Sir Omerod's that some sort of reconciliation
was not effected. Indeed, she once showed me a letter from your uncle
when she was in trouble about those Canadian bonds."

"Yes, yes, I know it all," said Tony, rising, as if all his patience was
at last exhausted. "I have read the letter you speak of; he offered to
lend her five or six hundred pounds, or to give it, I forget which;
and he was to take _me_"--here he burst into a fit of laughter that was
almost hysterical in its harsh mockery--"to take me. I don't know what
he was to do with me, for I believe he has turned Papist, Jesuit, or
what not; perhaps I was to have been made a priest or a friar; at all
events, I was to have been brought up dependent on his bounty,--a bad
scheme for each of us. He would not have been very proud of his protege;
and, if I know myself, I don't think I 'd have been very grateful to my
protector. My dear mother, however, had too much of the mother in her to
listen to it, and she told him so, perhaps too plainly for his refined
notions in matters of phraseology; for he frumped and wrote no more to
us."

"Which is exactly the reason why a friend, speaking from the eminence
which a certain station confers, might be able to place matters on a
better and more profitable footing."

"Not with _my_ consent, sir, depend upon it," said Tony, fiercely.

"My dear Tony, there is a vulgar adage about the impolicy of quarrelling
with one's bread-and-butter; but how far more reprehensible would it be
to quarrel with the face of the man who cuts it?"

It is just possible that Sir Arthur was as much mystified by his own
illustration as was Tony, for each continued for some minutes to look
at the other in a state of hopeless bewilderment. The thought of one
mystery, however, recal