“Perhaps I have done you wrong,” he said.

“You have.”

“I beg your pardon.  I believe you are as honest and true a fellow as there is in Hertfordshire, but for those others—­”

“You think it’s about Mountjoy Scarborough, then?” asked Joshua.

“I do.  That infernal fool, Peter Prosper, has chosen to publish to the world that he has dropped me because of something that he has heard of that occurrence.  A wretched lie has been told with a purpose by Mountjoy Scarborough’s brother, and my uncle has taken it into his wise head to believe it.  The truth is, I have not been as respectful to him as he thinks I ought, and now he resents my neglect in this fashion.  He is going to marry your aunt in order that he may have a lot of children, and cut me out.  In order to justify himself, he has told these lies about me, and you see the consequence;—­not a man in the county is willing to speak to me.”

“I really think a great deal of it’s fancy.”

“You go and ask Mr. Harkaway.  He’s honest, and he’ll tell you.  Ask this new cousin of yours, Mr. Prosper.”

“I don’t know that they are going to make a match of it, after all.”

“Ask my own father.  Only think of it,—­that a puling, puking idiot like that, from a mere freak, should be able to do a man such a mischief!  He can rob me of my income, which he himself has brought me up to expect.  That he can do by a stroke of his pen.  He can threaten to have sons like Priam.  All that is within his own bosom.  But to justify himself to the world at large, he picks up a scandalous story from a man like Augustus Scarborough, and immediately not a man in the county will speak to me.  I say that that is enough to break a man’s heart,—­not the injury done which a man should bear, but the injustice of the doing.  Who wants his beggarly allowance!  He can do as he likes about his own money.  I shall never ask him for his money.  But that he should tell such a lie as this about the county is more than a man can endure.”

“What was it that did happen?” asked Joshua.

“The man met me in the street when he was drunk, and he struck at me and was insolent.  Of course I knocked him down.  Who wouldn’t have done the same?  Then his brother found him somewhere, or got hold of him, and sent him out of the country, and says that I had held my tongue when I left him in the street.  Of course I held my tongue.  What was Mountjoy to me?  Then Augustus has asked me sly questions, and accuses me of lying because I did not choose to tell him everything.  It all comes out of that.”

Here they had reached the rectory, and Harry, after seeing that the horses were properly supplied with gruel, took himself and his ill-humor up-stairs to his own chamber.  But Joshua had a word or two to say to one of the inmates of the rectory.