joy an offer of sixteen shillings for the lot.
My dear father bought them--I should not be surprised to learn that he
bought them at a premium. If they ever touched a premium for a day, that
is certainly the day that he would have hit upon to buy. Oh, it was too
rare! Too inspired! He left nearly a hundred thousand pounds' worth of
paper--that is, on its face--upon which the solicitors realized, I
think it was thirteen hundred pounds. It's hard to imagine how he got
them--but there were actually bonds among them issued by Kossuth's
Hungarian Republic in 1848. Well--now you can see the kind of
inheritance I came into, and I have a brother and sister more or less to
look after, too."

Thorpe had been listening to these details with an almost exaggerated
expression of sympathy upon his face. The voice in which he spoke now
betrayed, however, a certain note of incredulity.

"Yes, I see that well enough," he remarked. "But what I don't perhaps
quite understand--well, this is it. You have this place of yours in the
country, and preserve game and so on--but of course I see what you mean.
It's what you've been saying. What another man would think a comfortable
living, is poverty to a man in your position."

"Oh, the place," said Plowden. "It isn't mine at all. I could never have
kept it up. It belongs to my mother. It was her father's place; it has
been in their family for hundreds of years. Her father, I daresay you
know, was the last Earl of Hever. The title died with him. He left three
daughters, who inherited his estates, and my mother, being the eldest,
got the Kentish properties. Of course Hadlow House will come to me
eventually, but it is hers during her lifetime. I may speak of it as
my place, but that is merely a facon de parler; it isn't necessary to
explain to everybody that it's my mother's. It's my home, and that's
enough. It's a dear old place. I can't tell you how glad I am that
you're going to see it."

"I'm very glad, too," said the other, with unaffected sincerity.

"All the ambitions I have in the world," the nobleman went on, sitting
upright now, and speaking with a confidential seriousness, "centre round
Hadlow. That is the part of me that I'm keen about. The Plowdens are
things of yesterday. My grandfather, the Chancellor, began in a very
small way, and was never anything more than a clever lawyer, with a loud
voice and a hard heart, and a talent for money-making and politics.
He got a peerage and he