e, to hold any communication with Mr Armstrong. Know that,
of the two men, the man you affect to scorn is infinitely less a villain
than this smug hypocrite. Go!"

She made no reply, but went, choking with misery and a smarting sense of
injustice. No longer was it easy to hug herself into the delusion that
this was all a horrid dream. Her father stood on the brink of ruin, and
she could not help him.

"If only," said she, "it had been anything else! O God, pity my poor
father!"

The captain's thoughts were of a very different kind. He had clung to
the hope that Rosalind would after all solve his difficulties by
undertaking the venture he had set before her. He had already in
imagination soothed his own conscience and smoothed away all the
difficulties which beset the undertaking.

"It might be for her good, after all, dear girl! She will reclaim him.
A fortune lies before them; for Roger will be easily convinced, and will
surrender his claim to them. Ratman is too long-sighted not to see that
I can help him in the matter, and that on my own terms. We shall start
fresh with a clear balance-sheet, and live in comfort." Now, however,
these bright hopes were dashed, and to the captain's mind he owed his
failure, first and last, to Mr Frank Armstrong. Had he not come home,
he said to himself, Rosalind would have yielded.

With him still at Maxfield everything came to a dead lock. Ratman could
not be propitiated, still less satisfied. The accounts would be
restlessly scrutinised.

Rosalind, and in less degree Tom and Jill, would be mutinous. Roger, at
home or abroad, would be beyond reach.

All the grudges of the past months seemed to culminate in this crowning
injury; and if to wish ill to one's fellow is to be a murderer, Captain
Oliphant had already come perilously near to adding one new sin to his
record.

But where, all this while, was the ingenuous Mr Ratman? Why had he
not, true to his word, come to claim his own--if not the Maxfield
estate, at any rate the little balance due to him from his old Indian
crony?

The captain, after a week or two of disappointed dread, was beginning to
recover a little of his ease of mind, and flattering himself that, after
all his creditor's bark was worse than his bite, when the blow abruptly
fell.

Mr Armstrong had gone for the day to visit one of his very few old
college friends on the other side of the county, and Tom, released from
his lessons (the capta