e's daughter.

'Since you will speak about it in this public way--' began Nidderdale.

'I think it ought to be spoken about in a public way,' said Dolly.

'I deny it as publicly. I can't say anything about the letter except
that I am sure Mr Melmotte did not put your name to it. From what I
understand there seems to have been some blunder between your father
and his lawyer.'

'That's true enough,' said Dolly; 'but it doesn't excuse Melmotte.'

'As to the money, there can be no more doubt that it will be paid than
that I stand here. What is it?--twenty-five thousand, isn't it?'

'Eighty thousand, the whole.'

'Well,--eighty thousand. It's impossible to suppose that such a man
as Melmotte shouldn't be able to raise eighty thousand pounds.'

'Why don't he do it then?' asked Dolly.

All this was very unpleasant and made the club less social than it
used to be in old days. There was an attempt that night to get up a
game of cards; but Nidderdale would not play because he was offended
with Dolly Longestaffe; and Miles Grendall was away in the country,--a
fugitive from the face of Melmotte, and Carbury was in hiding at home
with his countenance from top to bottom supported by plasters, and
Montague in these days never went to the club. At the present moment
he was again in Liverpool, having been summoned thither by Mr
Ramsbottom. 'By George,' said Dolly, as he filled another pipe and
ordered more brandy and water, 'I think everything is going to come to
an end. I do indeed. I never heard of such a thing before as a man
being done in this way. And then Vossner has gone off, and it seems
everybody is to pay just what he says they owed him. And now one can't
even get up a game of cards. I feel as though there were no good in
hoping that things would ever come right again.'

The opinion of the club was a good deal divided as to the matter in
dispute between Lord Nidderdale and Dolly Longestaffe. It was admitted
by some to be 'very fishy.' If Melmotte were so great a man why didn't
he pay the money, and why should he have mortgaged the property before
it was really his own? But the majority of the men thought that Dolly
was wrong. As to the signature of the letter, Dolly was a man who
would naturally be quite unable to say what he had and what he had not
signed. And then, even into the Beargarden there had filtered, through
the outer world, a feeling that people were not now bound to be so
punctilious in the paying of mo