osed after her, 'Lord, what
ceremony!' he said, with an ugly sneer. 'Is't real, man, or are you
bubbling her? And what is this Cock-lane story of a chaise and the rest?
Out with it, unless you want to be tossed in a blanket.'

'True, upon my honour!' Mr. Thomasson asseverated.

'Oh, but Tommy, the fortune?' Lord Almeric protested seriously. 'I vow
you are sharping us.'

'True too, my lord, as I hope to be saved!'

'True? Oh, but it is too monstrous absurd,' my lord wailed. 'The Little
Masterson? As pretty a little tit as was to be found in all Oxford. The
Little Masterson a fortune?'

'She has eyes and a shape,' Mr. Pomeroy admitted generously. 'For the
rest, what is the figure, Mr. Thomasson?' he continued. 'There are
fortunes and fortunes.'

Mr. Thomasson looked at the gallery above, and thence, and slyly, to
his companions and back again to the gallery; and swallowed something
that rose in his throat. At length he seemed to make up his mind to
speak the truth, though when he did so it was in a voice little above a
whisper. 'Fifty thousand,' he said, and looked guiltily round him.

Lord Almeric rose from his chair as if on springs. 'Oh, I protest!' he
said. 'You are roasting us. Fifty thousand! It's a bite?'

But Mr. Thomasson nodded. 'Fifty thousand,' he repeated softly. 'Fifty
thousand.'

'Pounds?' gasped my lord. 'The Little Masterson?'

The tutor nodded again; and without asking leave, with a dogged air
unlike his ordinary bearing when he was in the company of those above
him, he drew a decanter towards him, and filling a glass with a shaking
hand raised it to his lips and emptied it. The three were on their feet
round the table, on which several candles, luridly lighting up their
faces, still burned; while others had flickered down, and smoked in the
guttering sockets, among the empty bottles and the litter of cards. In
one corner of the table the lees of wine had run upon the oak, and
dripped to the floor, and formed a pool, in which a broken glass lay in
fragments beside the overturned chair. An observant eye might have found
on the panels below the gallery the vacant nails and dusty lines whence
Lelys and Knellers, Cuyps and Hondekoeters had looked down on two
generations of Pomeroys. But in the main the disorder of the scene
centred in the small table and the three men standing round it; a
lighted group, islanded in the shadows of the hall.

Mr. Pomeroy waited with impatience until Mr. Thomasson