Now, that she should be possessed by the spirit of parsimony on my behalf at such a time as this, was to my conception insanely comical, and her manner of expressing it was too much for me.  I kept my laughter under to hear her continue:  ’What numbers are flocking on the pier! and there is no music yet.  Tell me, Harry, that the money is all safe; nearly all; it is important to know; you promised economy.’

‘Music did you speak of, Miss Beltham?’ My father bowed to her gallantly.  ’I chanced to overhear you.  My private band performs to the public at midday.’

She was obliged to smile to excuse his interruption.

‘What’s that? whose band?’ said the squire, bursting out of Janet’s hand.  ‘A private band?’

Janet had a difficulty in resuming her command of him.  The mention of the private band made him very restive.

’I ’m not acting on my own judgement at all in going to these foreign people,’ he said to Janet.  ’Why go?  I can have it out here and an end to it, without bothering them and their interpreters.’

He sang out to me:  ’Harry, do you want me to go through this form for you?—­mn’d unpleasant!’

My aunt Dorothy whispered in my ear:  ‘Yes! yes!’

‘I feel tricked!’ he muttered, and did not wait for me to reply before he was again questioning my aunt Dorothy concerning Mr. Bannerbridge, and my father as to ‘that sum of money.’  But his method of interrogation was confused and pointless.  The drift of it was totally obscure.

‘I’m off my head to-day,’ he said to Janet, with a sideshot of his eye at my father.

‘You waste time and trouble, grandada,’ said she.

He vowed that he was being bewildered, bothered by us all; and I thought I had never seen him so far below his level of energy; but I had not seen him condescend to put himself upon a moderately fair footing with my father.  The truth was, that Janet had rigorously schooled him to bridle his temper, and he was no match for the voluble easy man without the freest play of his tongue.

‘This prince!’ he kept ejaculating.

’Won’t you understand, grandada, that you relieve him, and make things clear by going?’ Janet said.

He begged her fretfully not to be impatient, and hinted that she and he might be acting the part of dupes, and was for pursuing his inauspicious cross-examination in spite of his blundering, and the ‘Where am I now?’ which pulled him up.  My father, either talking to my aunt Dorothy, to Janet, or to me, on ephemeral topics, scarcely noticed him, except when he was questioned, and looked secure of success in the highest degree consistent with perfect calmness.

‘So you say you tell me to go, do you?’ the squire called to me.  ’Be good enough to stay here and wait.  I don’t see that anything’s gained by my going:  it’s damned hard on me, having to go to a man whose language I don’t know, and he don’t know mine, on a business we’re all of us in a muddle about.  I’ll do it if it’s right.  You’re sure?’