f the
strength and bulk of the insolent obtruder--nothing of the peril of odds
so unequal in a personal encounter. But the dignity which pervaded all
his habits, and often supplied to him the place of discretion, came,
happily for himself, to his aid now. He strike a man whom he so
despised!--he raise that man to his own level by the honour of a blow
from his hand! Impossible! "You will!" he said. "Well, be it so. Are you
come again to tell me that a child of my daughter lives, and that you
won my daughter's fortune by a deliberate lie?"

"I am not come to speak of that girl, but of myself. I say that I have
a claim on you, Mr. Darrell; I say that turn and twist the truth as you
will, you are still my father-in-law, and that it is intolerable that I
should be wanting bread, or driven into actual robbery, while my wife's
father is a man of countless wealth, and has no heir except--but I
will not now urge that child's cause; I am content to abandon it if so
obnoxious to you. Do you wish me to cut a throat, and to be hanged,
and all the world to hear the last dying speech and confession of Guy
Darrell's son-in-law? Answer me, sir?"

"I answer you briefly and plainly. It is simply because I would not have
that last disgrace on Guy Darrell's name that I offer you a subsistence
in lands where you will be less exposed to those temptations which
induced you to invest the sums that, by your own tale, had been obtained
from me on false pretences, in the sink of a Paris gambling house. A
subsistence that, if it does not pamper vice, at least places you beyond
the necessity of crime, is at your option. Choose it or reject it as you
will."

"Look you, Mr. Darrell," said Jasper, whose temper was fast giving way
beneath the cold and galling scorn with which he was thus cast aside,
"I am in a state so desperate, that, rather than starve, I may take what
you so contemptuously fling to--your daughter's husband; but--"

"Knave!" cried Darrell, interrupting him, "do you again and again urge
it as a claim upon me, that you decoyed from her home, under a false
name, my only child; that she died in a foreign land-broken-hearted, if
I have rightly heard is that a claim upon your duped victim's father?"

"It seems so, since your pride is compelled to own that the world would
deem it one, if the jail chaplain took down the last words of your
son-in-law! But, _basta, basta!_ hear me out, and spare hard names; for
the blood is mounting into m