“Is he such a coward that he dare not see me?”

“There are some actions, Mr Dale, that will make a coward of any man.  My friend Crosbie is, I take it, brave enough in the ordinary sense of the word, but he has injured you.”

“It is all true, then?”

“Yes, Mr Dale; I fear it is all true.”

“And you call that man your friend!  Mr—­; I don’t know what your name is.”

“Pratt;—­Fowler Pratt.  I have known Crosbie for fourteen years,—­ever since he was a boy; and it is not my way, Mr Dale, to throw over an old friend under any circumstances.”

“Not if he committed a murder.”

“No; not though he committed a murder.”

“If what I hear is true, this man is worse than a murderer.”

“Of course, Mr Dale, I cannot know what you have heard.  I believe that Mr Crosbie has behaved very badly to your niece, Miss Dale; I believe that he was engaged to marry her, or, at any rate, that some such proposition had been made.”

“Proposition!  Why, sir, it was a thing so completely understood that everybody knew it in the county.  It was so positively fixed that there was no secret about it.  Upon my honour, Mr Pratt, I can’t as yet understand it.  If I remember right, its not a fortnight since he left my house at Allington,—­not a fortnight.  And that poor girl was with him on the morning of his going as his betrothed bride.  Not a fortnight since!  And now I’ve had a letter from an old family friend telling me that he is going to marry one of Lord de Courcy’s daughters!  I went instantly off to Courcy, and found that he had started for London.  Now, I have followed him here; and you tell me it’s all true.”

“I am afraid it is, Mr Dale; too true.”

“I don’t understand it; I don’t, indeed.  I cannot bring myself to believe that the man who was sitting the other day at my table should be so great a scoundrel.  Did he mean it all the time that he was there?”

“No; certainly not.  Lady Alexandrina de Courcy was, I believe, an old friend of his;—­with whom, perhaps, he had had some lover’s quarrel.  On his going to Courcy they made it up, and this is the result.”

“And that is to be sufficient for my poor girl?”

“You will, of course, understand that I am not defending Mr Crosbie.  The whole affair is very sad,—­very sad, indeed.  I can only say, in his excuse, that he is not the first man who has behaved badly to a lady.”

“And that is his message to me, is it?  And that is what I am to tell my niece?  You have been deceived by a scoundrel.  But what then?  You are not the first!  Mr Pratt, I give you my word as a gentleman, I do not understand it.  I have lived a good deal out of the world, and am, therefore, perhaps; more astonished than I ought to be.”

“Mr Dale, I feel for you—­”

“Feel for me!  What is to become of my girl?  And do you suppose that I will let this other marriage go on; that I will not tell the de Courcys, and all the world at large, what sort of a man this is,—­that I will not get at him to punish him?  Does he think that I will put up with this?”