The old man knew his younger son well, and he had known, too, the character of his elder son; but he had not calculated enough on the change which must have been made by such a revelation as he, his father, had made to him.  Mountjoy had felt that all the world was against him, and that, as best he might, he would make use of all the world, excepting only his father, who of all the world was the falsest and the most cruel.  As for his brother, he would bleed his brother to the very last drop without any compunction.  Every bottle of champagne that came into the house was, to Mountjoy’s thinking, his own, bought with his money, and therefore fit to be enjoyed by him.  But as for his father, he doubted whether he could remain with his father without flying at his throat.

The old man decidedly preferred his elder son of the two.  He had found that Augustus could not bear success, and had first come to dislike him, and then to hate him.  What had he not done for Augustus?  And with what a return!  No doubt Augustus had, till the spring of this present year, been kept in the background; but no injury had come to him from that.  His father, of his own good will, with infinite labor and successful ingenuity, had struggled to put him back in the place which had been taken from him.  Augustus might, not unnaturally, have expressed himself as angry.  He had not done so but had made himself persistently disagreeable, and had continued to show that he was waiting impatiently for his father’s death.  It had come to pass that at their last meeting he had hardly scrupled to tell his father that the world would be no world for him till his father had left it.  This was the reward which the old man received for having struggled to provide handsomely and luxuriously for his son!  He still made his son a sufficient allowance befitting the heir of a man of large property, but he had resolved never to see him again.  It was true that he almost hated him, and thoroughly despised him.

But since the departure and mysterious disappearance of his eldest son his regard for the sinner had returned.  He had become apparently a hopeless gambler.  His debts had been paid and repaid.  At last the squire had learned that Mountjoy owed so much on post-obits that the farther payment of them was an impossibility.  There was no way of saving him.  To save the property he must undo the doings of his early youth, and prove that the elder son was illegitimate.  He had still kept the proofs, and he did it.

To the great disgust of Mr. Grey, to the dismay of creditors, to the incredulous wonder of Augustus, and almost to the annihilation of Mountjoy himself, he had done it.  But there had been nothing in Mountjoy’s conduct which had in truth wounded him.  Mountjoy’s vices had been dangerous, destructive, absurdly foolish, but not, to his father, a shame.  He ridiculed gambling as a source of excitement.  No man could win much without dishonest practices, and fraud at cards would certainly be detected.