"Her? He lost more than ever she was worth, I'll be bound. He lost to that extent that he had to sell his commission to pay. The young fool! he must have been a raving lunatic."
"And what did he do then?" asked Rachel, taking out her handkerchief and blowing her nose ostentatiously.
"No one quite knows what he did for the first few years after he sold out. He lived in Paris most of his time, and knocked about on the continent, at Baden and those places—up to no good, you may be sure. Then he went to the Cape, hunting and amusing himself; and then to California, gold-digging; and then all about South America, trying farming or cattle-raising, or something of that sort; and then Digby went home and married his sister, and she persuaded him to come here."
"Has he been here long?"
"A year or two. He has lived with them most of the time—learning colonial experience of Digby, I suppose. She is awfully fond of him, that little woman. And Digby never says a word against him—for her sake, I suppose."
"Why should he say anything against him?" asked Rachel rather warmly. "He is doing nothing wrong now, is he?"
"Oh, no. He is older and wiser now, I daresay. Still—still—" and Mr. Thornley looked askance at the pretty young creature who was about to make this reprobate's acquaintance under his roof, and bethought him that he ought to secure her against temptation and danger—"still there's no doubt that he is rather a bad lot—what you would call a black sheep, you know, my dear—not the sort of man that it is desirable to be very intimate with."
Rachel blushed one of her ready blushes, and with such suddenness and vigour that Mr. Thornley feared he had accidentally made equivocal suggestions.
"I don't mean that he is not a gentleman—a thoroughly honourable gentleman," he explained hastily. "I don't know the rights of that Newmarket business, but in everything else, as far as I am aware, his moral character is as good as mine is; otherwise I should not ask him to Adelonga. I am only speaking of him as a man who has lived a sort of loose, extravagant, Bohemian kind of life, you know."
"I know," assented Rachel absently. Already his prudent tactics were having their natural effect. She was ready to champion the cause of this apparently friendless, as well as unfortunate man; in whom, had he been recommended to her favour, she might—I do not say she would, but she might—have felt only an ordinary unemotional interest; and she did not want to hear any more to his disparagement.