one before the other, but doubly turned queen's evidence at once
against their worthy coadjutor and employer. In the hope, then, of
ruining him, if not of getting scathelessly off themselves, these
ladies-legatees mustered once more from the mazes of St. Giles's the
pack of competent Irish witnesses, collected whatever documentary or
other evidence looked likeliest to help their ends, and then one early
day presented themselves before the lord-mayor, eager to destroy at a
blow that pleasant Mr. Dillaway.

The proceedings were long, cautious, tedious, and secret: emissaries to
Belfast, Doctors' Commons, and the bank: the stamp office was stirred to
its foundations; and Canterbury staggered at the fraud. Thus within a
week the proper officials were in a condition to prosecute, and the
issue of immense examinations tended to that point of satisfaction, the
haling Mr. Dillaway to prison on the charge of having forged a will.

CHAPTER XII.

HEART'S CORE.

They were come into great want, poor Henry and Maria: they had not
wherewithal for daily sustenance. The few remaining trinkets, books,
clothes, and other available moveables had been gradually pledged away,
and to their full amount--at least, the pawnbroker said so. That unlucky
publication of the law book, so speedily condemned and heartlessly
ridiculed, had wrecked all Henry's possible prospects in the courts; and
as for help from friends--the casual friends of common life--he was too
proud to beg for that--too sensitive, too self-respectful. Relations he
had none, or next to none--that distant cousin of his mother's, the
Mac-something, whom he had never even seen, but who, nevertheless, had
acted as his guardian.

Much as he suspected Dillaway in the matter of that bitter breach of
trust, he had neither ready money to proceed against him, (nor, when he
came to think it over) any legal grounds at all to go upon; for, as we
have said before, even granting there should be evidence adduced of the
transfer of stock from the name of Clements to that of Dillaway, still
it was a notorious fact that the "Independent bank" had failed, whereto
the stock-broker could swear he had intrusted it. In short, shrewd Jack
had managed all that affair to admiration; and poor Clements was ruined
without hope, and defrauded without remedy.

Then, again, we already know how that Lady Dillaway was dead, so help
from her was simply impossible; and the miserable father Sir Thomas wa