“A joke!” growled Dacres.  “I don’t see any joke in it.  I remember when you said that Biggs’s nieces were at the bottom of your troubles, I asked whether it might be this one.”

“So you did, old chap; and I replied that I hoped not.  So you need not shake your gory locks at me, my boy.”

“But I don’t like the looks of it.”

“Neither do I.”

“Yes, but you see it looks as though she had been already set apart for you especially.”

“And pray, old man, what difference can that make, when I don’t set myself apart for any thing of the kind?”

Dacres sat in silence with a gloomy frown over his brow.

“Besides, are you aware, my boy, of the solemn fact that Biggs’s nieces are legion?” said Hawbury.  “The man himself is an infernal old bloke; and as to his nieces—­heavens and earth!—­old! old as Methuselah; and as to this one, she must be a grandniece—­a second generation.  She’s not a true, full-blooded niece.  Now the lady I refer to was one of the original Biggs’s nieces.  There’s no mistake whatever about that, for I have it in black and white, under my mother’s own hand.”

“Oh, she would select the best of them for you.”

“No, she wouldn’t.  How do you know that?”

“There’s no doubt about that.”

“It depends upon what you mean by the best.  The one you call the best might not seem so to her, and so on.  Now I dare say she’s picked out for me a great, raw-boned, redheaded niece, with a nose like a horse.  And she expects me to marry a woman like that! with a pace like a horse!  Good Lord!”

And Hawbury leaned back, lost in the immensity of that one overwhelming idea.

“Besides,” said he, standing up, “I don’t care if she was the angel Gabriel.  I don’t want any of Biggs’s nieces.  I won’t have them.  By Jove!  And am I to be entrapped into a plan like that?  I want Ethel.  And what’s more, I will have her, or go without.  The child-angel may be the very identical one that my mother selected, and if you assert that she is, I’ll be hanged if I’ll argue the point.  I only say this, that it doesn’t alter my position in the slightest degree.  I don’t want her.  I won’t have her.  I don’t want to see her.  I don’t care if the whole of Biggs’s nieces, in solemn conclave, with old Biggs at their head, had formally discussed the whole matter, and finally resolved unanimously that she should be mine.  Good Lord, man! don’t you understand how it is?  What the mischief do I care about any body?  Do you think I went through that fiery furnace for nothing?  And what do you suppose that life on the island meant?  Is all that nothing?  Did you ever live on an island with the child-angel?  Did you ever make a raft for her and fly?  Did you ever float down a river current between banks burned black by raging fires, feeding her, soothing her, comforting her, and all the while feeling in a general fever about her?  You hauled her out of a crater, did you?  By Jove!  And what of that?  Why, that furnace that I pulled Ethel out of was worse than a hundred of your craters.  And yet, after all that, you think that I could be swayed by the miserable schemes of a lot of Biggs’s nieces!  And you scowl at a fellow, and get huffy and jealous.  By Jove!”