ughing and interrupted
manner, but with no pause long enough for Godfrey to make it a pretext
for taking up the word again. He felt that his father meant to ward
off any request for money on the ground of the misfortune with
Wildfire, and that the emphasis he had thus been led to lay on his
shortness of cash and his arrears was likely to produce an attitude of
mind the utmost unfavourable for his own disclosure. But he must go on,
now he had begun.

"It's worse than breaking the horse's knees--he's been staked and
killed," he said, as soon as his father was silent, and had begun to
cut his meat. "But I wasn't thinking of asking you to buy me another
horse; I was only thinking I'd lost the means of paying you with the
price of Wildfire, as I'd meant to do. Dunsey took him to the hunt to
sell him for me the other day, and after he'd made a bargain for a
hundred and twenty with Bryce, he went after the hounds, and took some
fool's leap or other that did for the horse at once. If it hadn't been
for that, I should have paid you a hundred pounds this morning."

The Squire had laid down his knife and fork, and was staring at his son
in amazement, not being sufficiently quick of brain to form a probable
guess as to what could have caused so strange an inversion of the
paternal and filial relations as this proposition of his son to pay him
a hundred pounds.

"The truth is, sir--I'm very sorry--I was quite to blame," said
Godfrey. "Fowler did pay that hundred pounds. He paid it to me, when
I was over there one day last month. And Dunsey bothered me for the
money, and I let him have it, because I hoped I should be able to pay
it you before this."

The Squire was purple with anger before his son had done speaking, and
found utterance difficult. "You let Dunsey have it, sir? And how long
have you been so thick with Dunsey that you must _collogue_ with him to
embezzle my money? Are you turning out a scamp? I tell you I won't
have it. I'll turn the whole pack of you out of the house together,
and marry again. I'd have you to remember, sir, my property's got no
entail on it;--since my grandfather's time the Casses can do as they
like with their land. Remember that, sir. Let Dunsey have the money!
Why should you let Dunsey have the money? There's some lie at the
bottom of it."

"There's no lie, sir," said Godfrey. "I wouldn't have spent the money
myself, but Dunsey bothered me, and I was a fool, and let him have it