He paused, and changed his position uneasily. His brows contracted; his eye grew restless as he continued to reflect.
"It's my belief," he said at last, "that Mrs. Luttrell will be enchanted. And then what will become of me?"
He rose from his chair and began to pace up and down the room. "What will become of me?" he repeated. "What will become of the fifteen-hundred a-year, and the house and grounds, and all the rest of the good things that she promised to give me? They will go, no doubt, to the son and heir. Did she ever propose to give me anything while Richard and Brian had to be provided for? Not she! She notices me now only because she thinks that I am the only Luttrell in existence. When she knows that there is a son of her's still living, I shall go to the wall. I shall be ruined. There will be no Netherglen for me, no marriage with an heiress, no love-making with pretty little Kitty. I shall have to disappear from the scene. I cannot hold my ground against a son—a son of the house! Curses on him! Why isn't he dead?"
Hugo bestowed a few choice Sicilian epithets of a maledictory character upon Dino Vasari and Brian Luttrell both; then he returned to the table and studied the latter pages of Father Cristoforo's letter.
"Meet him in London. I should like to meet Dino Vasari, too. I wonder whether Brian had read this letter when he dropped it. These instructions come at the very end. If he has not read these sentences, I might find a way of outwitting them all yet. I think I could prevent Dino Vasari from ever setting foot in Scotland. How can I find out?"
"And what an extraordinary thing for Brian to do—to take a tutorship in the very family where Elizabeth Murray is living. What has he done it for? Is he in love with one of those girls? Or does he hope to retrieve his mistake by persuading Elizabeth Murray to marry him? A very round-about way of getting back his fortune, unless he means to induce Dino Vasari to hold his tongue. If Dino Vasari were out of the way, and Brian felt his title to the estate rather shaky, of course, it would be very clever of him to make love to Elizabeth. But he's too great a fool for that. What was his motive, I wonder? Is it possible that he did not know who she was?"
But he rejected this suggestion as an entirely incredible one.
After a little further thought, another idea occurred to him. Father Cristoforo's letter consisted of three closely-written sheets of paper. He separated the first sheet from the others; the last words on the sheet ran as follows:—
"Is it on account of either of these ladies that you have returned to England?"
This sheet he folded and enclosed in an envelope, which he carefully sealed and addressed to John Stretton, Esquire. He placed the other sheets in his own pocket-book, and then went peacefully to bed. He could do nothing more, he told himself, and, although his excitable disposition prevented his sleeping until dawn grew red in the eastern sky, he would not waste his powers unnecessarily by sitting up to brood over the resolution that he had taken.