, and a jar of tobacco, water and a glass being on it,
ready to his hand. He had done his best to infect Lionel with a taste
for rum-and-water--as a convenient beverage to be taken at any hour from
seven o'clock in the morning onwards--but Lionel had been proof against
it. John had the rum-drinking to himself, as he had the smoking. Lionel
had behaved to him liberally. It was not in Lionel Verner's nature to
behave otherwise, no matter to whom. From the moment the codicil was
found, John Massingbird had no further right to a single sixpence of the
revenues of the estate. He was in the position of one who has nothing.
It was Lionel who had found means for all--for his expenses, his voyage;
for a purse when he should get to Australia. John Massingbird was
thinking of this as he sat now, smoking and taking draughts of the
rum-and-water.

"If ever I turn to work with a will and become a hundred-thousand-pound
man, old fellow," he suddenly broke out, "I'll pay you back. This, and
also what I got rid of while the estate was in my hands."

Lionel, who had been looking from the window in a reverie, turned
round and laughed. To imagine John Massingbird becoming a
hundred-thousand-pound man through his own industry, was a stretch of
fancy marvellously comprehensive.

"I have to make a clean breast of it to-night," resumed John
Massingbird, after puffing away for some minutes in silence. "Do you
remember my saying to you, the day we heard news of the codicil's being
found, that I was in your debt?"

"I remember your saying it," replied Lionel. "I did not understand what
you meant. You were not in my debt."

"Yes, I was. I had a score to pay off as big as the moon. It's as big
still; for it's one that never can be paid off; never will be."

Lionel looked at him in surprise; his manner was so unusually serious.

"Fifty times, since I came back from Australia, have I been on the point
of clearing myself of the secret. But, you see, there was Verner's Pride
in the way. You would naturally have said upon hearing it, 'Give the
place up to me; you can have no moral right to it.' And I was not
prepared to give it up; it seemed too comfortable a nest, just at first,
after the knocking about over yonder. Don't you perceive?"

"I don't perceive, and I don't understand," replied Lionel. "You are
speaking in an unknown language."

"I'll speak in a known one, then. It was through me that old Ste Verner
left Verner's Pride away from yo