"Just so. And it is because you are thinking of all this, that I feel it right to tell you. Papa, I shall never be married."
"We will leave that for the present, Emily."
"Very well; only if it would make a change in your will, you should make it. You will have to be here, Papa, after I am gone,—probably."
"No, no, no."
"But, if it were not so, I should not know what to do. That is all, Papa; only this,—that I beg your pardon for all the trouble I have caused you." Then she knelt before him, and he kissed her head, and blessed her, and wept over her.
There was nothing more heard from Cousin George at Humblethwaite, and nothing more heard of him for a long time. Mr. Boltby did pay his debts, having some terribly hard struggles with Mr. Hart and Captain Stubber before the liquidations were satisfactorily effected. It was very hard to make Mr. Hart and Captain Stubber understand that the Baronet was paying these debts simply because he had said that he would pay them once before, under other circumstances, and that no other cause for their actual payment now existed. But the debts were paid, down to the last farthing of which Mr. Boltby could have credible tidings. "Pay everything," Sir Harry had said; "I have promised it." Whereby he was alluding to the promise which he had made to his daughter. Everything was paid, and Cousin George was able to walk in and out of his club, a free man,—and at times almost happy,—with an annuity of five hundred pounds a year! Nothing more was said to him as to the necessity of expatriation.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE END.
Among playgoing folk, in the following April there was a great deal of talk about the marriage of that very favourite actress, Mrs. Morton. She appeared in the playbills as Mrs. George Hotspur, late Mrs. Morton. Very many spoke of her familiarly, who knew her only on the stage,—as is the custom of men in speaking of actresses,—and perhaps some few of these who spoke of her did know her personally. "Poor Lucy!" said one middle-aged gentleman over fifty, who spent four nights of every week at one theatre or another. "When she was little more than a child they married her to that reprobate Morton. Since that she has managed to keep her head above water by hard work; and now she has gone and married another worse than the first!"