Such were Captain Vignolles’s plaints to himself, as he sat there looking at the suspicious document which Mountjoy had left in his hands.  To him it was a fact that he had been cruelly used in having such a bit of paper thrust upon him instead of being paid by a check which on the morning would be honored.  And as he thought of his own career; his ready-money payments; his obedience to certain rules of the game,—­rules, I mean, against cheating; as he thought of his hands, which in his own estimation were beautifully clean; his diligence in his profession, which to him was honorable; his hard work; his late hours; his devotion to a task which was often tedious; his many periods of heart-rending loss, which when they occurred would drive him nearly mad; his small customary gains; his inability to put by anything for old age; of the narrow edge by which he himself was occasionally divided from defalcation, he spoke to himself of himself as of an honest, hard-working professional man upon whom the world was peculiarly hard.

But Major Moody went home to his wife quite content with the thirty pounds which he had won.

CHAPTER XLIII.

MR. PROSPER IS VISITED BY HIS LAWYERS.

Mr. Prosper had not been in good spirits at the time at which Mountjoy Scarborough had visited him.  He had received some time previously a letter from Mr. Grey, as described in a previous chapter, and had also known exactly what proposal had been made by Mr. Grey to Messrs. Soames & Simpson.  An equal division of the lady’s income, one half to go to the lady herself, and the other half to Mr. Prosper, with an annuity of two hundred and fifty pounds out of the estate for the lady if Mr. Prosper should die first:  these were the terms which had been offered to Miss Thoroughbung with the object of inducing her to become the wife of Mr. Prosper.  But to these terms Miss Thoroughbung had declined to accede, and had gone about the arrangement of her money-matters in a most precise and business-like manner.  A third of her income she would give up, since Mr. Prosper desired it; but more than that she “would owe it to herself and her friends to decline to abandon.”  The payment for the fish and the champagne must be omitted from any agreement on her part.  As to the ponies, and their harness, and the pony-carriage, she would supply them.  The ponies and the carriage would be indispensable to her happiness.  But the maintenance of the ponies must be left to Mr. Prosper.  As for the dower, she could not consent to accept less than four hundred—­or five hundred, if no house was to be provided.  She thought that seven hundred and fifty would be little enough if there were no children, as in that case there was no heir for whom Mr. Prosper was especially anxious.  But as there probably would be children, Miss Thoroughbung thought that this was a matter to which Mr. Prosper would not give much consideration.  Throughout it all she maintained a beautiful equanimity, and made two or three efforts to induce Mr. Prosper to repeat his visit to Marmaduke Lodge.  She herself wrote to him saying that she thought it odd that, considering their near alliance, he should not come and see her.  Once she said that she had heard that he was ill, and offered to go to Buston Hall to visit him.