“Who on earth is Mr. Juniper?” he asked.  “Oh, I remember;—­Amelia’s lover.”

“Do you mean to say you forgot Mr. Juniper?  I never shall forget him.  What a horrid man he is!”

“I never saw Mr. Juniper in my life.  What did he want of you?”

“He says you have ruined him utterly.  He came here about two o’clock, and found me at work in the garden.  He made his way in through the open gate, and would not be sent back though one of the girls told him that there was nobody at home.  He had seen me, and I could not turn him out, of course.”

“What did he say to you?  Was he impudent?”

“He did not insult me, if you mean that; but he was impudent in not going away, and I could not get rid of him for an hour.  He says that you have doubly ruined him.”

“As how?”

“You would not let Amelia have the fortune that you promised her; and I think his object now was to get the fortune without the girl.  And he said, also, that he had lent five hundred pounds to your Captain Scarborough.”

“He is not my Captain Scarborough.”

“And that when you were settling the captain’s debts his was the only one you would not pay in full.”

“He is a rogue,—­an arrant rogue!”

“But he says that he’s got the captain’s name to the five hundred pounds; and he means to get it some of these days, now that the captain and his father are friends again.  The long and the short of it is, that he wants five hundred pounds by hook or by crook, and that he thinks you ought to let him have it.”

“He’ll get it, or the greater part of it.  There’s no doubt he’ll get it if he has got the captain’s name.  If I remember right, the captain did sign a note for him to that amount,—­and he’ll get the money if he has stuck to it.”

“Do you mean that Captain Scarborough would pay all his debts?”

“He will have to pay that one, because it was not included in the schedule.  What do you think has turned up now?”

“Some other scheme?”

“It is all scheming,—­base, false scheming,—­to have been concerned with which will be a disgrace to my name forever!”

“Oh, papa!”

“Yes; forever!  He has told me, now, that Mountjoy is his true, legitimate, eldest son.  He declares that that story which I have believed for the last eight months has been altogether false, and made out of his own brain to suit his own purposes.  In order to enable him to defraud these money-lenders he used a plot which he had concocted long since, and boldly declared Augustus to be his heir.  He made me believe it; and because I believed it, even those greedy, grasping men, who would not have given up a tithe of their prey to save the whole family, even they believed it too.  Now, at the very point of death, he comes forward with perfect coolness, and tells me that the whole story was a plot made out of his own head.”

“Do you believe him now?”