and containing an advertisement stating that Messrs.
Baines and Jolly would henceforth act as agents of the Indian Company.
Legal proceedings were presently threatened by the solicitors of the
Company against the banking firm which had caused so much mischief. Mr.
Hobson Newcome was absent abroad when the circumstance took place, and
it was known that the protest of the bills was solely attributable to
his nephew and partner. But after the break between the two firms,
there was a rupture between Hobson's family and Colonel Newcome. The
exasperated Colonel vowed that his brother and his nephew were traitors
alike, and would have no further dealings with one or the other. Even
poor innocent Sam Newcome, coming up to London from Oxford, where he
had been plucked, and offering a hand to Clive, was frowned away by our
Colonel, who spoke in terms of great displeasure to his son for taking
the least notice of the young traitor.

Our Colonel was changed, changed in his heart, changed in his whole
demeanour towards the world, and above all towards his son, for whom he
had made so many kind sacrifices in his old days. We have said how,
ever since Clive's marriage, a tacit strife had been growing up between
father and son. The boy's evident unhappiness was like a reproach to
his father. His very silence angered the old man. His want of confidence
daily chafed and annoyed him. At the head of a large fortune, which he
rightly persisted in spending, he felt angry with himself because he
could not enjoy it, angry with his son, who should have helped him
in the administration of his new estate, and who was but a listless,
useless member of the little confederacy, a living protest against all
the schemes of the good man's past life. The catastrophe in the City
again brought father and son together somewhat, and the vindictiveness
of both was roused by Barnes's treason. Time was when the Colonel
himself would have viewed his kinsman more charitably, but fate
and circumstance had angered that originally friendly and gentle
disposition; hate and suspicion had mastered him, and if it cannot be
said that his new life had changed him, at least it had brought out
faults for which there had hitherto been no occasion, and qualities
latent before. Do we know ourselves, or what good or evil circumstance
may bring from us? Did Cain know, as he and his younger brother played
round their mother's knee, that the little hand which caressed Abel
should