“I think that he will turn up safely,” said the lawyer.  “I think that if it were made worth his while he would turn up at once.”

“Is it not better that he should be away?” Mr. Grey shrugged his shoulders.  “What’s the good of his coming back into a nest of hornets?  I have always thought that he did very well to disappear.  Where is he to live if he came back?  Should he come here?”

“Not with his gambling debts unpaid at the club.”

“That might have been settled.  Though, indeed, his gambling was as a tub that has no bottom to it.  There has been nothing for it but to throw him over altogether.  And yet how very much the better he has been of the two!  Poor Mountjoy!”

“Poor Mountjoy!”

“You see, if I hadn’t disinherited him I should have had to go on paying for him till the whole estate would have been squandered even during my lifetime.”

“You speak as though the law had given you the power of disinheriting him.”

“So it did.”

“But not the power of giving him the inheritance.”

“I took that upon myself.  There I was stronger than the law.  Now I simply and humbly ask the law to come and help me.  And the upshot is that Augustus takes upon himself to lecture me and to feel aggrieved.  He is not angry with me for what I did about Mountjoy, but is quarrelling with me because I do not die.  I have no idea of dying just to please him.  I think it important that I should live just at present.”

“But will you let him have the money to pay these creditors?”

“That is what I want to speak about.  If I can see the list of the sums to be paid, and if you can assure yourself that by paying them I shall get back all the post-obit bonds which Mountjoy has given, and that the money can be at once raised upon a joint mortgage, to be executed by me and Augustus, I will do it.  But the first thing must be to know the amount.  I will join Augustus in nothing without your consent.  He wants to assume the power himself.  In fact, the one thing he desires is that I shall go.  As long as I remain he shall do nothing except by my co-operation.  I will see you and him to-morrow, and now you may go and eat your dinner.  I cannot tell you how much obliged I am to you for coming.”  And then Mr. Grey left the room, went to his chamber, and in process of time made his way into the drawing-room.

CHAPTER XX.

Mr. Grey’s opinion of the Scarborough family.

Had Augustus been really anxious to see Mr. Grey before Mr. Grey went to his father, he would probably have managed to do so.  He did not always tell Mr. Jones everything.  “So the fellow has hurried up to the governor the moment he came into the house,” he said.

“He’s with him now.”

“Of course he is.  Never mind.  I’ll be even with him in the long-run.”  Then he greeted the lawyer with a mock courtesy as soon as he saw him.  “I hope your journey has done you no harm, Mr. Grey.”