Mr. Scarborough’s whole life had been passed in arranging tricks for the defeat of the law; and it had been his great glory so to arrange them as to make it impossible that the law should touch him.  Mountjoy had declared that he had been defrauded.  The creditors swore, with many oaths, that they had been horribly cheated by this man.  Augustus, no doubt, would so swear very loudly.  No man could swear more loudly than did Mr. Grey as he left the squire’s chamber after this last revelation.  But there was no one who could punish him.  The money-lenders had no writing under his hand.  Had Mountjoy been born without a marriage-ceremony it would have been very wicked, but the vengeance of the law would not have reached him.  If you deceive your attorney with false facts he cannot bring you before the magistrates.  Augustus had been the most injured of all; but a son, though he may bring an action against his father for bigamy, cannot summon him before any tribunal because he has married his mother twice over.  These were Mr. Scarborough’s death-bed triumphs; but they were very sore upon Mr. Grey.

On his journey back to town, as he turned the facts over more coolly in his mind, he began to fear that he saw a glimmer of the truth.  Before he reached London he almost thought that Mountjoy would be the heir.  He had not brought a scrap of paper away with him, having absolutely refused to touch the documents offered to him.  He certainly would not be employed again either by Mr. Scarborough or on behalf of his estate or his executors.  He had threatened that he would take up the cudgels on behalf of Augustus, and had felt at the moment that he was bound to do so, because, as he had then thought, Augustus had the right cause.  But as that idea crumbled away from him, Augustus and his affairs became more and more distasteful to him.  After all, it ought to be wished that Mountjoy should become the elder son,—­even Mountjoy, the incurable gambler.  It was terrible to Mr. Grey that the old, fixed arrangement should be unfixed, and certainly there was nothing in the character of Augustus to reconcile him to such a change.

But he was a very unhappy man when he put himself into a cab to be carried down to Fulham.  How much better would it have been for him had he taken his daughter’s advice, and persistently refused to make this last journey to Tretton!  He would have to acknowledge to his daughter that Mr. Scarborough had altogether got the better of him, and his unhappiness would consist in the bitterness of that acknowledgment.

But when he reached the Manor House his daughter met him with news of her own which for the moment kept his news in abeyance.  “Oh, papa,” she said, “I am so glad you’ve come!” He had sent her a telegram to say that he was coming.  “Just when I got your message I was frightened out of my life.  Who do you think was here with me?”

“How am I to think, my dear?”

“Mr. Juniper.”