“What would you call ‘the best’ if I may ask?” said I, growing the cooler with some better seeing of the way ahead.

“The marriage settlements!” he cried shrilly, coming to the point at once, as any miser would. “’Tis the merest matter of form, as ye may say, for your title to Appleby Hundred is well burnt out, I promise you.  But for the decent look of it you might make over your quitclaim to your wife.”

“Aye, truly; so I might.”

“And so you should, sir; that you should, ye miserable, spying runag”—­he choked and coughed behind his hand and then began again without the epithets. “’Tis the very least ye can do for her now, when you have the rope fair around your curs—­ahem—­your—­your rebel neck.  Only for the form’s sake, to be sure, ye understand, for she’d inherit after you in any case.”

I saw his drift at last, and, not caring to spare him, sped the shaft of truth and let it find the joint in his harness.

“’Tis as you say, Mr. Stair.  But as it chances, Mistress Margery is not my wife.”

If I had flung the candle at him where he stood fumbling behind him for the door-latch,’twould not have made him shrink or dodge the more.

“Wha—­what’s that ye say?” he piped in shrillest cadence.  “Not married?  Then you—­you—­”

“I lied to save her honor—­that was all.  A wife might do the thing she did and go scot free of any scandal; but not a maid, as you could see and hear.”

For some brief time it smote him speechless, and in the depth of his astoundment he forgot his foolish fear of me and fell to pacing up and down, though always with the table cannily between us.  And as he shuffled back and forth the thin lips muttered foolish nothings, with here and there a tremulous oath.  When all was done he dropped into a chair and stared across at me with leaden eyes; and truly he had the look of one struck with a mortal sickness.

“I think—­I think you owe me something now beyond your keeping, Captain Ireton,” he quavered, at length, mumbling the words as do the palsied.

“Since you are Margery’s father, I owe you anything a dying man can pay,” said I.

“Words; empty words,” he fumed.  “If it were a thing to do, now—­”

“You need but name the thing and I will do it willingly.”

Instead of naming it he shot a question at me, driving it home with certain random thrustings of the shifty eyes.

“Who is your next of kin, Captain Ireton?”

“Septimus, of the same name, master of Iretondene, on the James River, and a major in the Virginia line,” I answered, wondering how my cousin once removed should figure in the present coil.  But Gilbert Stair’s next question dispelled the mystery.

“If you should die intestate, this Septimus would be your heir?”

“As next of kin, I should suppose he would.  But I have nothing to devise.”

“True; and yet”—­he paused again as if the wording of it were not easy.