“Yes,” said the squire, after a pause, “I believe you.  You haven’t that kind of ingenuity which enables a man to tell a lie and stick to it.  I have.  It’s a very great gift if a man be enabled to restrain his appetite for lying.”  Harry could only smile when he heard the squire’s confession.  “Only think how I have lied about Mountjoy; and how successful my lies might have been, but for his own folly!”

“People do judge you a little harshly now,” said Harry.

“What’s the odd’s?  I care nothing for their judgment; I endeavored to do justice to my own child, and very nearly did it.  I was very nearly successful in rectifying the gross injustice of the world.  Why should a little delay in a ceremony in which he had no voice have robbed him of his possessions?  I determined that he should have Tretton, and I determined also to make it up to Augustus by denying myself the use of my own wealth.  Things have gone wrongly not by my own folly.  I could not prevent the mad career which Mountjoy has run; but do you think that I am ashamed because the world knows what I have done?  Do you suppose my death-bed will be embittered by the remembrance that I have been a liar?  Not in the least.  I have done the best I could for my two sons, and in doing it have denied myself many advantages.  How many a man would have spent his money on himself, thinking nothing of his boys, and then have gone to his grave with all the dignity of a steady Christian father!  Of the two men I prefer myself; but I know that I have been a liar.”

What was Harry Annesley to say in answer to such an address as this?  There was the man, stretched on his bed before him, haggard, unshaved, pale, and grizzly, with a fire in his eyes, but weakness in his voice,—­bold, defiant, self-satisfied, and yet not selfish.  He had lived through his life with the one strong resolution of setting the law at defiance in reference to the distribution of his property; but chiefly because he had thought the law to be unjust.  Then, when the accident of his eldest son’s extravagance had fallen upon him, he had endeavored to save his second son, and had thought, without the slightest remorse, of the loss which was to fall on the creditors.  He had done all this in such a manner that, as far as Harry knew, the law could not touch him, though all the world was aware of his iniquity.  And now he lay boasting of what he had done.  It was necessary that Harry should say something as he rose from his seat, and he lamely expressed a wish that Mr. Scarborough might quickly recover.  “No, my dear fellow,” said the squire; “men do not recover when they are brought to such straits as I am in.  Nor do I wish it.  Were I to live, Augustus would feel the second injustice to be quite intolerable.  His mind is lost in amazement at what I had contemplated.  And he feels that the matter can only be set right between him and fortune by my dying at once.  If he were to understand that I were to live ten years longer, I think that he would either commit a murder or lose his senses.”