“Your affectionate aunt,

“SARAH MOUNTJOY.

“P.S.—­May I as your loving aunt add one word of passionate entreaty?  All Tretton is yours now, and the honor of Tretton is within your keeping.  Do not go back to those wretched tables!”

Mountjoy Scarborough when he received this letter cannot be said to have been made unhappy by it, because he had already known all his unhappiness.  But he turned it in his mind as though to think what would now be the best course of life open to him.  And he did think that he had better go back to those tables against which his aunt had warned him, and there remain till he had made the acres of Tretton utterly disappear.  There was nothing for him which seemed to be better.  And here at home in England even that would at present be impossible to him.  He could not enter the clubs, and elsewhere Samuel Hart would be ever at his heels.  And there was his brother with his lawsuit, though on that matter a compromise had already been offered to him.  Augustus had proposed to him by his lawyer to share Tretton.  He would never share Tretton.  His brother should have an income secured to him, but he would keep Tretton in his own hands,—­as long as the gambling-tables would allow him.

He was, in truth, a wretched man, as on that night he did make up his mind, and ringing his bell called his servant out of his bed to bid him prepare everything for a sudden start.  He would leave Tretton on the following day, or on the day after, and intended at once to go abroad.  “He is off for that place nigh to Italy where they have the gambling-tables,” said the butler, on the following morning, to the valet who declared his master’s intentions.

“I shouldn’t wonder, Mr. Stokes,” said the valet.  “I’m told it’s a beauteous country and I should like to see a little of that sort of life myself.”  Alas, alas!  Within a week from that time Captain Scarborough might have been seen seated in the Monte Carlo room, without any friendly Samuel Hart to stand over him and guard him.

CHAPTER LXII.

THE LAST OF MR. GREY.

“I have put in my last appearance at the old chamber in Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” said Mr. Grey, on arriving home one day early in June.

“Papa, you don’t mean it!” said Dolly.

“I do.  Why not one day as well as another?  I have made up my mind that it is to be so.  I have been thinking of it for the last six weeks.  It is done now.”

“But you have not told me.”

“Well, yes; I have told you all that was necessary.  It has come now a little sudden, that is all.”

“You will never go back again?”

“Well, I may look in.  Mr. Barry will be lord and master.”

“At any rate he won’t be my lord and master!” said Dolly, showing by the tone of her voice that the matter had been again discussed by them since the last conversation which was recorded, and had been settled to her father’s satisfaction.