“Sir, you are what I have always found you.  Do you wish me to be what you have always found me?”

“I’d be sorry to see you anything else, boy.”

“Then, sir, I can’t do this.  In honour, I can’t.”

“Are you married already?” thundered Mark.

“Not quite as bad as that;” and in spite of his agitation Tom laughed, but hysterically, at the notion.  “But fool I am; for I am in love with another woman.  I am, sir,” went he on hurriedly.  “Boy that I am! and she don’t even know it:  but if you be the man I take you for, you may be angry with me, but you’ll understand me.  Anything but be a rogue to you and to Mary, and to my own self too.  Fool I’ll be, but rogue I won’t!”

Mark strode on in silence, frightfully red in the face for full five minutes.  Then he turned sharply on Tom, and catching him by the shoulder, thrust him from him.

“There,—­go! and don’t let me see or hear of you; that is, till I tell you!  Go along, I say!  Hum-hum!” (in a tone half of wrath, and half of triumph), “his father’s child!  If you will ruin yourself, I can’t help it.”

“Nor I, sir,” said Tom, in a really piteous tone, bemoaning the day he ever saw Aberalva, as he watched Mark stride into his own gate.  “If I had but had common luck!  If I had but brought my L1500 safe home here, and never seen Grace, and married this girl out of hand!  Common luck is all I ask, and I never get it!”

And Tom went home sulkier than a bear:  but he did not let his father find out his trouble.  It was his last evening with the old man.  To-morrow he must go to London, and then—­to scramble and twist about the world again till he died!  “Well, why not?  A man must die somehow:  but it’s hard on the poor old father,” said Tom.

As Tom was packing his scanty carpet-bag next morning, there was a knock at the door.  He looked out, and saw Armsworth’s clerk.  What could that mean?  Had the old man determined to avenge the slight, and to do so on his father, by claiming some old debt?  There might be many between him and the doctor.  And Tom’s heart beat fast, as Jane put a letter into his hand.

“No answer, sir, the clerk says.”

Tom opened it, and turned over the contents more than once ere he could believe his own eyes.

It was neither more nor less than a cheque on Mark’s London banker for just five hundred pounds.

A half-sheet was wrapped round it, on which were written these words:—­

“To Thomas Thurnall, Esq., for behaving like a gentleman.  The cheque will be duly honoured at Messrs. Smith, Brown, and Jones, Lombard Street.  No acknowledgment is to be sent.  Don’t tell your father.  MARK ARMSWORTH.”

“Queer old world it is!” said Tom, when the first burst of childish delight was over.  “And jolly old flirt, Dame Fortune, after all!  If I had written this in a book now, who’d have believed it?”

“Father,” said he, as he kissed the old man farewell, “I’ve a little money come in.  I’ll send you fifty from London in a day or two, and lodge a hundred and fifty more with Smith and Co.  So you’ll be quite in clover while I am poisoning the Turkeys, or at some better work.”