“Really, uncle,” said Charles Holland, “I did think that you had discarded the notion.”

“Did you?  I have been thinking of it, and it ain’t so desirable to be a vampyre, I am sure, that any one should pretend to it who is not; therefore, I take the fellow upon his own showing.  He is a vampyre in his own opinion, and so I don’t see, for the life of me, why he should not be so in ours.”

“Well,” said Henry, “waving all that, what are we to do with him?  Circumstances seem to have thrown him completely at our mercy.  What are we to do with him, and what is to become of him for the future?”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said the admiral.  “If he were ten times a vampyre, there is some good in the fellow; and I will give him enough to live upon if he will go to America and spend it.  They will take good care there that he sucks no blood out of them; for, although an American would always rather lose a drop of blood than a dollar, they keep a pretty sharp look out upon both.”

“The proposal can be made to him,” said Henry, “at all events.  It is one which I don’t dislike, and probably one that he would embrace at once; because he seems, to me, to have completely done with ambition, and to have abandoned those projects concerning which, at one time, he took such a world of trouble.”

“Don’t you trust to that,” said the admiral.  “What’s bred in the bone don’t so easily get out of the flesh; and once or twice, when Master Varney has been talking, I have seen those odd looking eyes of his flash up for a moment, as if he were quite ready to begin his old capers again, and alarm the whole country side.”

“I must confess,” said Charles Holland, that I myself have had the impression once or twice that Varney was only subdued for a time, and that, with a proper amount of provocation, he would become again a very serious fellow, and to the full as troublesome as he has been.”

“Do you doubt his sincerity?” said Henry.

“No, I do not do that, Henry:  I think Varney fully means what he says; but I think, at the same time, that he has for so long lead a strange, wild, and reckless life, that he will find it very far from easy, if indeed possible, to shake off his old habits and settle down quietly, if not to say comfortably.”

“I regret,” said Henry, “that you have such an impression; but, while I do so, I cannot help admitting that it is, to a considerable extent, no more than a reasonable one; and perhaps, after all, my expectation that Varney will give us no more trouble, only amounts to a hope that he will not do so, and nothing more.  But let us consider; there seems to be some slight difference of opinion among us, as to whether we should take up our residence at this new house of ours, which we did not know we owned, at Dearbrook, or proceed to London, and there establish ourselves, or again return to Bannerworth Hall, and, by a judicious expenditure of some money, make that a more habitable place than it has been for the last twenty years.”