only gave him pain. Meet
thus--altered, fallen, imbruted--the fine gentleman whose calm eye
had quelled him in the widow's drawing-room in his day of comparative
splendour--that in itself was distasteful to the degenerated bravo. But
he felt as if he should be at more disadvantage in point of argument
with a cool and wary representative of Darrell's interests, than he
should be even with Darrell himself. And unable to produce the child
whom he arrogated the right to obtrude, he should be but exposed to a
fire of cross-questions without a shot in his own locker. Accordingly
he declined, point-blank, to see Colonel Morley; and declared that the
terms he himself had proposed were the lowest he would accept. "Tell
Colonel Morley, however, that if negotiations fail, I shall not fail,
sooner or later, to argue my view of the points in dispute with my kind
father-in-law, and in person."

"Yes, hang it!" cried Poole, exasperated; "go and see Darrell yourself.
He is easily found."

"Ay," answered Jasper, with the hardest look of his downcast sidelong
eye--"Ay; some day or other it may come to that. I would rather not, if
possible. I might not keep my temper. It is not merely a matter of money
between us, if we two meet. There are affronts to efface. Banished his
house like a mangy dog--treated by a jackanapes lawyer like the dirt
in the kennel! The Loselys, I suspect, would have looked down on the
Darrells fifty years ago; and what if my father was born out of wedlock,
is the blood not the same? Does the breed dwindle down for want of a
gold ring and priest? Look at me. No; not what I now am; not even as
you saw me five years ago; but as I leapt into youth! Was I born to cast
sums and nib pens as a City clerk? Aha, my poor father, you were wrong
there! Blood will out! Mad devil, indeed, is a racer in a citizen's gig!
Spavined, and wind-galled, and foundered--let the brute go at last to
the knockers; but by his eye, and his pluck, and his bone, the brute
shows the stock that he came from!"

Dolly opened his eyes and-blinked. Never in his gaudy days had Jasper
half so openly revealed what, perhaps, had been always a sore in his
pride; and his outburst now may possibly aid the reader to a subtler
comprehension of the arrogance, and levity, and egotism, which
accompanied his insensibility to honour, and had converted his very
claim to the blood of a gentleman into an excuse for a cynic's disdain
of the very virtues for which a g