‘And like a fool, you think—­eh?’

‘I have no such thought in my head, sir.’

’You have been keeping that fellow in his profligacy, and you ’re keeping him now.  Why, you ’re all but a beggar! . . .  Comes to my house, talks of his birth, carries off my daughter, makes her mad, lets her child grow up to lay hold of her money, and then grips him fast and pecks him, fleeces him! . . .  You ’re beggared—­d ’ye know that?  He’s had the two years of you, and sucked you dry.  What were you about?  What were you doing?  Did you have your head on?  You shared cheque-books? good! . . .  The devil in hell never found such a fool as you!  You had your house full of your foreign bonyrobers—­eh?  Out with it!  How did you pass your time?  Drunk and dancing?’

By such degrees my grandfather worked himself up to the pitch for his style of eloquence.  I have given a faint specimen of it.  When I took the liberty to consider that I had heard enough, he followed me out of the library into the hall, where Janet stood.  In her presence, he charged the princess and her family with being a pack of greedy adventurers, conspirators with ‘that fellow’ to plunder me; and for a proof of it, he quoted my words, that my father’s time had been spent in superintending the opening of a coal-mine on Prince Ernest’s estate.  ‘That fellow pretending to manage a coal-mine!’ Could not a girl see it was a shuffle to hoodwink a greenhorn?  And now he remembered it was Colonel Goodwin and his daughter who had told him of having seen ’the fellow’ engaged in playing Court-buffoon to a petty German prince, and performing his antics, cutting capers like a clown at a fair.

‘Shame!’ said Janet.

‘Hear her!’ The squire turned to me.

But she cried:  ’Oh! grandada, hear yourself! or don’t, be silent.  If Harry has offended you, speak like one gentleman to another.  Don’t rob me of my love for you:  I haven’t much besides that.’

‘No, because of a scoundrel and his young idiot!’

Janet frowned in earnest, and said:  ’I don’t permit you to change the meaning of the words I speak.’

He muttered a proverb of the stables.  Reduced to behave temperately, he began the whole history of my bankers’ book anew—­the same queries, the same explosions and imprecations.

‘Come for a walk with me, dear Harry,’ said Janet.

I declined to be protected in such a manner, absurdly on my dignity; and the refusal, together possibly with some air of contemptuous independence in the tone of it, brought the squire to a climax.  ’You won’t go out and walk with her?  You shall go down on your knees to her and beg her to give you her arm for a walk.  By God! you shall, now, here, on the spot, or off you go to your German princess, with your butler’s legacy, and nothing more from me but good-bye and the door bolted.  Now, down with you!’

He expected me to descend.