“No,” said Will, curtly.

“Ah!  Well!  I’ve often wondered what became of your mother.  She ran away from her friends when she was a young lass—­ a proud-spirited lass, and pretty, by Jove!  I knew the reason why she ran away,” said Raffles, winking slowly as he looked sideways at Will.

“You know nothing dishonorable of her, sir,” said Will, turning on him rather savagely.  But Mr. Raffles just now was not sensitive to shades of manner.

“Not a bit!” said he, tossing his head decisively “She was a little too honorable to like her friends—­that was it!” Here Raffles again winked slowly.  “Lord bless you, I knew all about ’em—­ a little in what you may call the respectable thieving line—­ the high style of receiving-house—­none of your holes and corners—­ first-rate.  Slap-up shop, high profits and no mistake.  But Lord!  Sarah would have known nothing about it—­a dashing young lady she was—­ fine boarding-school—­fit for a lord’s wife—­only Archie Duncan threw it at her out of spite, because she would have nothing to do with him.  And so she ran away from the whole concern.  I travelled for ’em, sir, in a gentlemanly way—­at a high salary.  They didn’t mind her running away at first—­godly folks, sir, very godly—­and she was for the stage.  The son was alive then, and the daughter was at a discount.  Hallo! here we are at the Blue Bull.  What do you say, Mr. Ladislaw?—­shall we turn in and have a glass?”

“No, I must say good evening,” said Will, dashing up a passage which led into Lowick Gate, and almost running to get out of Raffles’s reach.

He walked a long while on the Lowick road away from the town, glad of the starlit darkness when it came.  He felt as if he had had dirt cast on him amidst shouts of scorn.  There was this to confirm the fellow’s statement—­that his mother never would tell him the reason why she had run away from her family.

Well! what was he, Will Ladislaw, the worse, supposing the truth about that family to be the ugliest?  His mother had braved hardship in order to separate herself from it.  But if Dorothea’s friends had known this story—­if the Chettams had known it—­ they would have had a fine color to give their suspicions a welcome ground for thinking him unfit to come near her.  However, let them suspect what they pleased, they would find themselves in the wrong.  They would find out that the blood in his veins was as free from the taint of meanness as theirs.

CHAPTER LXI.

    “Inconsistencies,” answered Imlac, “cannot both be right,
    but imputed to man they may both be true.”—­Rasselas.

The same night, when Mr. Bulstrode returned from a journey to Brassing on business, his good wife met him in the entrance-hall and drew him into his private sitting-room.

“Nicholas,” she said, fixing her honest eyes upon him anxiously, “there has been such a disagreeable man here asking for you—­it has made me quite uncomfortable.”