On the following day at about four in the afternoon the mother and daughter drove up to the door of Graham’s Club in Bond Street, and there they found Lord Augustus.  With considerable difficulty he was induced to come down from the whist room, and was forced into the brougham.  He was a handsome fat man, with a long grey beard, who passed his whole life in eating, drinking, and playing whist, and was troubled by no scruples and no principles.  He would not cheat at cards because it was dangerous and ungentlemanlike, and if discovered would lead to his social annihilation; but as to paying money that he owed to tradesmen, it never occurred to him as being a desirable thing as long as he could get what he wanted without doing so.  He had expended his own patrimony and his wife’s fortune, and now lived on an allowance made to him by his brother.  Whatever funds his wife might have not a shilling of them ever came from him.  When he began to understand something of the nature of the business on hand, he suggested that his brother, the Duke, could do what was desirable infinitely better than he could.  “He won’t think anything of me,” said Lord Augustus.

“We’ll make him think something,” said Arabella sternly.  “You must do it, papa.  They’d turn you out of the club if they knew that you had refused.”  Then he looked up in the brougham and snarled at her.  “Papa, you must copy the letter and sign it.”

“How am I to know the truth of it all?” he asked.

“It is quite true,” said Lady Augustus.  There was very much more of it, but at last he was carried away bodily, and in his daughter’s presence he did write and sign the following letter;—­

My Lord,

I have heard from my daughter a story which has surprised me very much.  It appears that she has been staying with you at Rufford Hall, and again at Mistletoe, and that while at the latter place you proposed marriage to her.  She tells me with heart-breaking concern that you have now repudiated your own proposition,—­not only once made but repeated.  Her condition is most distressing.  She is in all respects your Lordship’s equal.  As her father I am driven to ask you what excuse you have to make, or whether she has interpreted you aright.

I have the honour to be,
Your very humble servant,
Augustus Trefoil.

CHAPTER XXIII

“In these Days one can’t make a Man marry”

This was going on while Lord Rufford was shooting in the neighbourhood of Dillsborough; and when the letter was being put into its envelope at the lodgings in Orchard Street, his Lordship was just sitting down to dinner with his guests at the Bush.  At the same time John Morton was lying ill at Bragton;—­a fact of which Arabella was not aware.