n Englishman?"

"Did he? Oh, pooh! Excuse him. It was but his natural wish to seem
ignorant of all about me. He did not know enough of my intimacy with you
to betray my secret."

"But he knew enough of it--must have known enough--to have made it right
that he should tell you I was in England. He does not seem to have done
so."

"No; that is strange--yet scarcely strange; for, when we last met, his
head was full of other things,--love and marriage. Basta! youth will be
youth."

"He has no youth left in him!" exclaimed Harley, passionately. "I doubt
if he ever had any. He is one of those men who come into the world with
the pulse of a centenarian. You and I never shall be as old as he was in
long clothes. Ah, you may laugh; but I am never wrong in my instincts.
I disliked him at the first,--his eye, his smile, his voice, his very
footstep. It is madness in you to countenance such a marriage; it may
destroy all chance of your restoration."

"Better that than infringe my word once passed."

"No, no," exclaimed Harley; "your word is not passed, it shall not be
passed. Nay, never look so piteously at me. At all events, pause till
we know more of this young man. If he be worthy of her without a dower,
why, then, let him lose you your heritage. I should have no more to
say."

"But why lose me my heritage? There is no law in Austria which can
dictate to a father what husband to choose for his daughter."

"Certainly not. But you are out of the pale of law itself just at
present; and it would surely be a reason for State policy to withhold
your pardon, and it would be to the loss of that favour with your own
countrymen, which would now make that pardon so popular, if it were
known that the representative of your name were debased by your
daughter's alliance with an English adventurer,--a clerk in a public
office. Oh, sage in theory, why are you such a simpleton in action?"

Nothing moved by this taunt, Riceabocca rubbed his hands, and then
stretched them comfortably over the fire.

"My friend," said he, "the representation of my name would pass to my
son."

"But you have no son."

"Hush! I am going to have one; my Jemima informed me of it yesterday
morning; and it was upon that information that I resolved to speak to
Leslie. Am I a simpleton now?"

"Going to have a son," repeated Harley, looking very bewildered; "how do
you know it is to be a son?"

"Physiologists are agreed," said the sage, positively, "that wh