rol--if you molest her, the
law will protect--"

"She is not of age," said Darvil. "Your health, old boy."

"Whether she is of age or not," returned the banker, unheeding the
courtesy conveyed in the last sentence, "I do not care three straws--I
know enough of the law to know that if she have rich friends in this
town, and you have none, she will be protected and you will go to the
treadmill."

"That is spoken like a sensible man," said Darvil, for the first time
with a show of respect in his manner; "you now take a practical view of
matters, as we used to say at the spouting-club."

"If I were in your situation, Mr. Darvil, I tell you what I would do.
I would leave my daughter and this town to-morrow morning, and I would
promise never to return, and never to molest her, on condition she
allowed me a certain sum from her earnings, paid quarterly."

"And if I preferred living with her?"

"In that case, I, as a magistrate of this town, would have you sent away
as a vagrant, or apprehended--"

"Ha!"

"Apprehended on suspicion of stealing that gold chain and seals which
you wear so ostentatiously."

"By goles, but you're a clever fellow," said Darvil, involuntarily; "you
know human natur."

The banker smiled: strange to say, he was pleased with the compliment.

"But," resumed Darvil, helping himself to another slice of beef, "you
are in the wrong box--planted in Queer Street, as _we_ say in London;
for if you care a d--n about my daughter's respectability, you will
never muzzle her father on suspicion of theft--and so there's tit for
tat, my old gentleman!"

"I shall deny that you are her father, Mr. Darvil; and I think you will
find it hard to prove the fact in any town where I am a magistrate."

"By goles, what a good prig you would have made! You are as sharp as a
gimlet. Surely you were brought up at the Old Bailey!"

"Mr. Darvil, be ruled. You seem a man not deaf to reason, and I ask
you whether, in any town in this country, a poor man in suspicious
circumstances can do anything against a rich man whose character is
established? Perhaps you are right in the main: I have nothing to do
with that. But I tell you that you shall quit this house in half an
hour--that you shall never enter it again but at your peril; and if you
do--within ten minutes from that time you shall be in the town gaol. It
is no longer a contest between you and your defenceless daughter; it is
a contest between--"

"A tramper in f