to pay his debts--an indispensable condition of his leaving the
colony. It is evident that the statements thus reported puzzled the
poor lady a little, and she seems to have been unable to account for
the lost heir sending his kind remembrance to his "grandpa," because
Roger's' paternal grandfather died before he was born; and his
grandfather by the mother's side had also died several years before
Roger left England, as the young man knew well enough. She was clearly
a little surprised to hear that the resuscitated Roger did not
understand a word of French, for "my son," she says, "was born in
Paris, and spoke French better than English." But yet, with the
strange pertinacity which causes people to cling to that which they
know to be wrong, and try to force themselves into belief of its
truth, she believed in the _bona-fides_ of the claimant for maternal
solicitude and the paternal acres. "I fancied," she said in one letter
to Gibbes, "that the photographies you sent me are like him, but of
course after thirteen years' absence there must have been some
difference in the shape, as Roger was very slim; but," she added, "I
suppose all those large clothes would make him appear bigger than he
is." Again, alluding to the "photographies," she remarks that at least
the hand in the portrait is small, and adds, "that peculiar thing has
done a good deal with me to make me recognise him. A year and a half
was consumed in these tedious hagglings with brokers and agents for
the restoration of a lost heir, and during great part of that time the
lost heir himself made no sign, but contented himself with begging
trifling loans of Gibbes on the strength of his pretensions. Sometimes
a pound was the modest request; sometimes more. He had married, and a
child was born, and on that occasion he implored for "three pound,"
plaintively declaring that he was "more like a mannick than a B. of
B.K. (supposed to mean a Baronet of British Kingdom) to have a child
born in such a hovel." Still the new man wrapped himself in
impenetrable secrecy. The Dowager Lady Tichborne complained that while
pressed to send everybody money, she was not even allowed to know the
whereabouts nor present name of her lost Roger; and she entreated
piteously to be allowed to communicate more directly. It was nothing
to her that the accounts the pretender had given of Roger's life were
wrong in every particular, except where her own advertisement had
furnished information.