you
yourself saw that wretched old attorney once or twice on the
subject?"

"I did see Mr. Camperdown, certainly. He is my own family lawyer."

"You were kind enough to interest yourself about the diamonds,--were
you not?" She asked him this as a question, and then waited for a
reply. "Was it not so?"

"Yes, Lady Eustace; it was so."

"They were of great value, and it was natural," continued Lizzie.
"Of course you interested yourself. Mr. Camperdown was full of awful
threats against me;--was he not? I don't know what he was not going
to do. He stopped me in the street as I was driving to the station in
my own carriage, when the diamonds were with me;--which was a very
strong measure, I think. And he wrote me ever so many,--oh, such
horrid letters. And he went about telling everybody that it was an
heirloom;--didn't he? You know all that, Lord Fawn?"

"I know that he wanted to recover them."

"And did he tell you that he went to a real lawyer,--somebody who
really knew about it, Mr. Turbot, or Turtle, or some such name as
that, and the real lawyer told him that he was all wrong, and that
the necklace couldn't be an heirloom at all, because it belonged to
me, and that he had better drop his lawsuit altogether? Did you hear
that?"

"No;--I did not hear that."

"Ah, Lord Fawn, you dropped your inquiries just at the wrong place.
No doubt you had too many things to do in Parliament and the
Government to go on with them; but if you had gone on, you would have
learned that Mr. Camperdown had just to give it up,--because he had
been wrong from beginning to end." Lizzie's words fell from her with
extreme rapidity, and she had become almost out of breath from the
effects of her own energy.

Lord Fawn felt strongly the necessity of clinging to the diamonds as
his one great and sufficient justification. "I thought," said he,
"that Mr. Camperdown had abandoned his action for the present because
the jewels had been stolen."

"Not a bit of it," said Lizzie, rising suddenly to her legs. "Who
says so? Who dares to say so? Whoever says so is--is a storyteller. I
understand all about that. The action could go on just the same, and
I could be made to pay for the necklace out of my own income if it
hadn't been my own. I am sure, Lord Fawn, such a clever man as you,
and one who has always been in the Government and in Parliament,
can see that. And will anybody believe that such an enemy as Mr.
Camperdown has been to me, persec