When dinner was over, Lady Belgrade gave the signal, and arose from the table.  Salome followed her, and left the two gentlemen to their wine.

“It afflicts me to have to call you Mr. Scott, my lord,” said Sir Lemuel, when he found himself alone with his guest.

“Then call me John, as you used to do when I rode upon your foot in my childhood, and when I used to come to you in all my worst scrapes in boyhood—­I shall never resume my title, Sir Lemuel,” replied the young man.

“Never!” exclaimed the banker.

“Never, Sir Lemuel.  A pauper lord is rather a ridiculous object.  I will never be one.”

“You could not be one.  I won’t hear you say such things about yourself.  See here, John.  Do you know why I bought Lone when I knew it was to be sold?”

“I suppose because you wanted it.”

“Now what did I want with Lone?  I, an old widower, without family, except one little girl at school?  I did not want Lone.  I wanted you to have it.  But I knew that if I did not buy it some one else would.  And—­I had this only daughter, who would have Lone after me.  And I thought perhaps—­But then you disappeared, you know, and no one on earth could tell for three years what had become of you, when you suddenly turned up as Mr. John Scott at the Premier’s dinner.”

The banker paused, and ran his hand through his gray hair.

The young man looked at him with curiosity and interest.

“Plague take it all! her mother, if she has one, could manage this matter so much better than I can,” muttered the banker, as he poured out a glass of wine and drank it.  “Well, Lord Arondelle—­I will give myself the pleasure of calling you so while we are tete-a-tete ’over the walnuts and wine.’  Lord Arondelle, there is my daughter; what do you think of her?” he demanded, bending down his gray brows and fixing his keen blue eyes scrutinizingly upon the young man’s face which flushed at the suddenness of the question.  But he quickly recovered himself, and replied in a low, reverent tone: 

“I think Miss Levison the loveliest young creature I have ever had the happiness to know.”

“You do!  So do I!  I think so too.  And the man who gets my girl to wife will get a pearl of price.”

“I truly believe that,” said the young man, with an involuntary sigh.

“That is right!  Ahem!  Bother it! a woman could do this so much better than such a blundering old fellow as I!  Well, there!  Salome has, in the three years since her first entrance into society, refused half a score of eligible men.  She is, and always has been, perfectly free from any such engagement.  If you are equally free, my dear marquis—­(If I could only be her mother for three seconds)—­Ahem! if you are equally free, and if you admire my girl as you say you do, and if you can win her affections—­she—­she shall be yours, and I will settle Lone upon her.  There, her mother would have done this better, I know.  So much better that you would have proposed to my daughter without ever dreaming that the suggestion came from our side.  But as for me, I have flung my girl at your head, nothing less!” grumbled the banker.