“Mr. Jan,” said the doctor, “it is not right that my nephew, John Massingbird, should enjoy Verner’s Pride.”

“Of course it’s not,” answered Jan.  “Only things don’t go by rights always, you know.  It’s but seldom they do.”

“He ought to give it up to Mr. Verner.”

“So I told him,” said Jan.  “I should, in his place.”

“What did he say?”

“Say?  Laughed at me, and called me green.”

Dr. West sat thoughtfully pulling his great dark whiskers.  Dark as they were, they had yet a tinge of red in the fire-light.  “It was a curious thing; a very curious thing, that both brothers should die, as was supposed, in Australia,” said he.  “Better—­as things have turned out—­that Fred should have turned up afterwards, than John.”

“I don’t know that,” spoke Jan with his accustomed truth-telling freedom.  “The pair were not good for much, but John was the best of them.”

“I was thinking of Sibylla,” candidly admitted the doctor.  “It would have been better for her.”

Jan opened his eyes considerably.

“Better for her!—­for it to turn out that she had two husbands living?  That’s logic, that is.”

“Dear me, to be sure!” cried the doctor.  “I was not thinking of that phase of the affair, Mr. Jan.  Is she in spirits?”

“Who?  Sibylla?  She’s fretting herself into her grave.”

Dr. West turned his head with a start.  “What at?  The loss of Verner’s Pride?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Jan, ever plain-spoken.  “She puzzles me.  When she was at Verner’s Pride, she never seemed satisfied.  She was perpetually hankering after excitement—­didn’t seem to care for Lionel, or for anybody else, and kept the house full of people from top to bottom.  She has a restless, dissatisfied temper, and it keeps her on the worry.  Folks with such tempers know no peace, and let nobody else know any that’s about them.  A nice life she leads Lionel!  Not that he’d drop a hint of it.  He’d cut out his tongue before he’d speak a word against his wife; he’d rather make her out to be an angel.”

“Are they pretty comfortably off for money?” inquired Dr. West, after a pause.  “I suppose Mr. Verner must have managed to feather his nest a little, before leaving?”

“Not a bit of it,” returned Jan.  “He was over head and ears in debt.  Sibylla helped him to a good portion of it.  She went the pace.  John Massingbird waives the question of the mesne profits, or Lionel would be in worse embarrassment than he is.”

Dr. West looked crestfallen.  “What do they live on?” he asked.  “Does Lady Verner keep them?  She can’t have too much for herself now.”

“Oh! it’s managed somehow,” said Jan.

Dr. West sat for some time in ruminating silence; pulling his whiskers as before, running his hands through his hair, the large clear blue sapphire ring, which he always wore on his finger, conspicuous.  Jan swayed his legs about, and waited to afford any further information.  Presently the doctor turned to him, a charming expression of open confidence on his countenance.