uch
trumpery consideration, and did not tell him, in round numbers, that
what he had done was an infamy."

"Then I fancy you'd lose your money, pretty much as you are losing your
temper,--that is, without getting anything in requital."

"What did you say to him, then?" said Harcourt, slightly abashed.

"A great deal in the same strain as you have just spoken in, doubtless
not as warm in vituperation, but possibly as likely to produce an
effect; nor is it in the least necessary to dwell upon that. What
Glencore has done, and what I have said about it, both belong to the
past. They are over,--they are irrevocable. It is to what concerns the
present and the future I wish now to address myself, and to interest
you."

"Why, the boy's name was in the Peerage,--I read it there myself."

"My dear Harcourt, you must have paid very little attention to me a
while ago, or you would have understood how that occurred."

"And here were all the people, the tenantry on the estate, calling
him the young lord, and the poor fellow growing up with the proud
consciousness that the title was his due."

"There is not a hardship of the case I have not pictured to my own mind
as forcibly as you can describe it," said Upton; "but I really do not
perceive that any reprobation of the past has in the slightest assisted
me in providing for the future."

"And then," murmured Harcourt,--for all the while he was pursuing his
own train of thought, quite irrespective of all Upton was saying,--"and
then he turns him adrift on the world without friend or fortune."

"It is precisely that he may have both the one and the other that I
have come to confer with you now," replied Upton. "Glencore has made a
liberal provision for the boy, and asked me to become his guardian. I
have no fancy for the trust, but I did n't see how I could decline
it. In this letter he assigns to him an income, which shall be legally
secured to him. He commits to me the task of directing his education,
and suggesting some future career, and for both these objects I want
your counsel."

"Education,--prospects,--why, what are you talking about? A poor fellow
who has not a name, nor a home, nor one to acknowledge him,--what need
has he of education, or what chance of prospects? I'd send him to sea,
and if he wasn't drowned before he came to manhood, I'd give him his
fortune, whatever it was, and say, 'Go settle in some of the colonies.'
You have no right to train him up to mee