“Thank you, but it is not mine; it concerns my nephew here.”

And then she braced up all her courage, and while Ascott busied himself over his walnuts—­he had the grace to look excessively uncomfortable—­she told, as briefly as possible, the bitter truth.

Mr. Ascott listened, apparently without surprise, and any how, without comment.  His self-important loquacity ceased, and his condescending smile passed into a sharp, reticent, business look.  He knitted his shaggy brows, contracted that coarsely-hung, but resolute mouth, in which lay the secret of his success in life, buttoned up his coat, and stuck his hands behind him over his coat-tails.  As he stood there on his own hearth, with all his comfortable splendors about him—­a man who had made his own money, hardly and honestly, who from the days when he was a poor errand-lad had had no one to trust to but himself, yet had managed always to help himself, ay, and others too—­Hilary’s stern sense of justice contrasted him with the graceful young man who sat opposite to him, so much his inferior, and so much his debtor.  She owned that Peter Ascott had a right to look both contemptuously and displeased.

“A very pretty story, but I almost expected it,” said he.

And there he stopped.  In his business capacity he was too acute a man to be a man of many words, and his feelings, if they existed, were kept to himself.

“It all comes to this, young man,” he continued, after an uncomfortable pause, in which Hilary could have counted every beat of her heart, and even Ascott played with his wine glass in a nervous kind of way—­“you want money, and you think I’m sure to give it, because it wouldn’t be pleasant just now to have discreditable stories going about concerning the future Mrs. Ascott’s relatives.  You’re quite right, it wouldn’t.  But I’m too old a bird to be caught with chaff for all that.  You must rise very early in the morning to take me in.”

Hilary started up in an agony of shame.  “That’s not fair, Mr. Ascott.  We do not take you in.  Have we not told you the whole truth?  I was determined you should know it before we asked you for one farthing of your money.  If there were the smallest shadow of a chance for Ascott in any other way, we never would have come to you at all.  It is a horrible, horrible humiliation!”

It might be that Peter Ascott had a soft place in his heart, or that this time, just before his marriage, was the one crisis which sometimes occurs in a hard man’s life, when, if the right touch comes, he becomes malleable ever after; but he looked kindly at the poor girl, and said, in quite a gentle way, “Don’t vex yourself, my dear.  I shall give the young fellow what he wants:  nobody ever called Peter Ascott stingy.  But he has cost me enough already:  he must shift for himself now.  Hand me over that check-book, Ascott; but remember this is the last you’ll ever see of my money.”

He wrote the memorandum of the check inside the page, then tore off the check itself, and proceeded to write the words “Twenty pounds,” date it, and sign it, lingering over the signature, as if he had a certain pride in the honest name “Peter Ascott,” and was well aware of its monetary value on Change and elsewhere.